karen jenkins

A Perfection in its realization of a complicated story. It is so full of meta structures: LaBeouf in role of his father ruined by envy of the talented offspring son, played by a real-life actor whose one-time stellar career is in ruins, who here is being upstaged by the current knockout upstart talent — Noah Jupe, a Christian-Bale caliber who burst on scene by walking away with every scene just as, or possibly by a wider margin than, the young Shia LaBeouf actually did; Lucas Hedges - another recent newcomer that just flattens any competition with sheer authenticity - who has established himself as The Personification of sublimated Pain [Manchester By Sea, Boy Erased, Ben is Back, Lady Bird] gets the line, “the only thing my dad gave me that I can use, is this pain, and you want me to let go of that?” And then there’s the fact that the whole story would’ve fallen flat without the show, not tell, of such a youngster’s utter Mozartian talent stuck in a trailer-trash world on which the real-life Shia LaBeouf story is based, with this requirement being fulfilled to gratuitous excess by an actual Mozartian talent, Noah Jupe. I noticed in real-time as I watched, the utterly perfect film-art evident in how the director depicted, for example, the blurred lines between real and fictional worlds the star character Otis operates in with the ‘real world?-no, cinema; cinema?-no, real; real world?-no, cinema. . . hell-I-don’t-know’ cuts of the film’s opening; swirling then-now-then-now-then-now imagery in sequences like like the walk-in-woods scream, or pool-side group therapy. The tenderness in scenes with young woman is almost shocking, so heightened is the vicarious longing for this release evoked in the viewer by the artful filmwork. This was a very fraught project, its success based on e v e r y nuance lining up, all the way through. I was saying to myself before film was over: this is why I turn myself into a pretzel to get to movies, to bear witness to an achievement like this when a unified auteur voice refuses to compromise on the vision.