The Mudge Boy

This is a remake of the short film Fishbelly White by Michael Burke (1998). The plot line and characters are all the same, but the story is fleshed out in The Mudge Boy.

In Fishbelly White, Duncan's character is more homo-erotic; the under-the-track-scene is more deliberate and graphic and explains much of what is left out of The Mudge Boy. In Fishbelly White, Duncan bites the head off his favorite chicken during the pick-up scene with the drunken youths and the rape scene never occurs.

The two films make for an interesting comparison of the two director's visions.

The sensitive hero, Duncan Mudge, beautifully played by Emile Hirsch, is victimized by a society characterized above all by fear and the cruelty this fear generates. In another lovely film with a similar theme, ("Get Real"), Steven, the main character asks, "What is everyone so afraid of?" Indeed that is the question that lurks at the core of this film. The answer is, of course, that everyone is afraid of being who he/she really is, thus earning the ridicule of everyone else who is suffering from a similar fear. Duncan seeks acceptance and affection, which he cannot get from his uncommunicative father, from a neighbor boy, Perry, whose instincts are in conflict, who is only half eaten by fear. Duncan tries to reach the better other half of Perry and crashed into Perry's ambivalence and is exploited in the process. Another reviewer here has said that Duncan is stupid. Can't Duncan see what is happening, why he is treated so cruelly by his peers? Why doesn't he give up his quest to be himself and conform? Isn't that what all of us do? I am put off by the question so often raised of whether this is a "gay film," or whether Duncan and/or Perry are gay. What bothers me about that is the need to categorize, to fix a label on a person, to commodify him. This provides an escape from seeing and relating to someone else as a complex person in his own right, not someone who fits in this box or that box. This need to classify, to objectify and to control is also a product of fear. I think it was H. L. Mencken who defined Puritanism as "that haunting fear what someone, somewhere, might be different." We are still in essence puritans.

`The Mudge Boy' is a tragic film about the failure of masculinity. Masculinity, at its most advanced, mature, and evolved is a protector of women, a mentor to children, a caretaker of animals, and a steward of the environment. We do not get to see this mature masculinity very often and its very rarity has led so many to believe that the only form of masculinity is its degraded form of tyranny, irresponsibility, violence, and mindless cruelty.

This film is close in genre to a prison movie or film noir. Its males, except for young Duncan, the Mudge boy himself, are all so degraded that they are fermenting in their toxic wastes and are unable to produce any positive energy even if only just to get the hell out of there. Their isolation cells are not made of steel bars, but of the wood of dense Vermont forests and the walls are not made of stone bricks, but of rolling green hills covered in pasture. Their prison is made of insularity and ignorance. The film is so relentlessly dark and uncomfortable to watch with its atmosphere of ever-existing potential and erupting violence, and with any hope of redemption wrung at the neck, that I think of this as a new genre, "rural' film noir, instead of urban, and something that should be categorized alongside a movie like `Deliverance'.

Femininity, with its life-giving fecundity, fares only slightly better in this film with at least one female having enough compassion to not only extend tenderness to someone weaker, but also attempt to protect herself from physical exploitation. But even she is ultimately helpless and alone in the face of relentlessly rampant violent and unrestrained male energy to which women are only as useful for copulation as animals are for the extraction of eggs and milk. The Mudge boy's mother, too, who in her absence seemed to leave her husband empty of all reason to live, had only herself been sucked dry of her life blood and left to die with an empty heart. The illusion of escape afforded by alcoholism was not enough to protect her with her basketful of tender eggs from the same fate of her beloved and memorialized chickens. How much better will her son fare?

So much of the Mudge boy's mother lived on in her son, but so did so much of his father, who was unable to communicate the needs of his heart and thus left his son alone with this rejection of their mutual need for tenderness. Although this film is presented as a gay film, and even won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2003 Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, this is much more a father and son film, and a story about how ultimately lost masculinity can be without fully developed and receptive hearts.

In this film's setting, the gentle, caring heart of the Mudge boy could be considered feminine and weak by those who confuse such qualities with the homosexual, but I think the boy's desire was only for tenderness and understanding, as was his father's desire. And in this involuted, backward setting, rather than that being enough for the men to earn what they wanted, what was required was for the Mudge boy to finally sink to a level so low as to chew off the very portion of himself that yearned for and needed such love. In the swallowing of what was precious in him, he was finally able to attract what he had wanted. But I wonder if by then, it was already too late to matter.

The Mudge Boy represents some of the finest cinema to come out of Sundance in 2003. The story moves at a leisurely pace but excels in character development and dialogue. Burke revels in his setting- a rural, emotional wasteland painted with eerily quiet, majestic landscapes which idly conflict with the title character's introversion and despair. Emile Hirsch affects a delicately nuanced, charismatic performance as the title character, struggling with the death of his beloved mother. Richard Jenkins demands every speck of attention possible while he's on screen; it's a pure delight to watch this fine actor work. I usually don't pick out smaller performances, but Zachary Knighton as the chief bully's "sidekick," Travis, is superbly threatening and commands the screen, as well. His performance is staggeringly three-dimensional and defies every cliche of "teenage bully" portrayals ever committed to celluloid. There's a big future for this guy. Overall, this film deserves to be seen by anyone who appreciates uncliched, moving drama filled with wonderful performances.

The Mudge Boy is about teenage sexuality in a rural setting. It reeks of Inde: the opening shots of somebody chased off a road even seem clipped from The Station Agent. However, its mix of B horror movie baddies and sensitive mama's boy, if never resolved, still is different from either set of formulas. A fine performance by Emile Hirsh as the `boy,' Duncan Mudge, is sufficient reason to watch this movie and make it stick in the mind. It's a neat trick Hirsh carries off to make his character come across as weird, but also nice, nice looking, and sociable. The young actor has a quality River Phoenix also notably had of being able to seem two places at once and uncomfortable (but smooth) at both – ingratiating, yet disgusted; or humiliated, yet pleased. It's quite a complex and able performance and one hopes it heralds more good things to come from Hirsh, who also starred in The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys.

Duncan, who's about sixteen, misses his recently deceased mom, to whom he was unusually close. He shows their closeness now by liking to wear her clothes on the sly at home. Duncan tends the chickens while his father does the heavier farm work alone. The boy goes everywhere with his mom's favorite white chicken, which he calms by putting its head in his mouth (now that's what I call acting!). Is he gay or is he just an unusual boy? He hasn't developed quite enough for there to be a definitive anwer to that question by the end of this pleasingly quirky film. The Mudge Boy isn't about that well-worked theme, coming of age, but about trying to remain oneself. It's certain that Duncan isn't your standard husky farm boy.

The bunch of young heavy metal guys (with gals) in their pickup truck, who approach periodically with B-movie menace, aren't all so macho themselves. One is pretty and longhaired. Another one, Perry (Tom Guiry), Duncan is kind of sweet on and Perry, who talks so dirty and goes after the girls, still by silent consent is Duncan's best buddy. The experienced child actor Guiry (who was Brendan Harris in Mystic River) strikes a neat balance between macho strutting (which involves some extremely blunt, graphic sexual language even by current standards) and an insecurity that makes sense when we learn his dad is abusive. Duncan's own dad is shut down but also needy in the absence of his wife and affectionate enough toward his son to disapprove but marginally tolerate his peculiarities.

Though The Mudge Boy may wind up being classified as some kind of gay coming of age movie, this isn't an environment in which a "coming out" process is possible or even desirable. First of all Duncan may be odd but never seems innocent. Nothing about Perry surprises him and he seems to have no awakening to come to or audience to share it with. If he's gay, which isn't quite a sure thing yet, who is he going to dramatically come out to? Perry knows Duncan's proclivities and exploits them in a brutal `loss of virginity' sequence, but maybe Duncan is just special. It's the movie's ambiguity that makes it unique -- though some scenes, such as Duncan's off-key solo at church, are too clumsy and indeterminate to make sense.

The trouble is that the movie never seems to know too well where it's going and its pacing drowns in rural torpor. The stakes aren't defined: it's never clear if it's Duncan himself who's in danger or just his pet chicken, and the writing doesn't provide enough of a progression toward anything other than the consensual rape scene and a final moment of tenderness between father and son. When Duncan tells Perry in front of the other truck crew `I'm not a faggot!,' is that just because the word is derogatory or is he really not gay and aware of that? Nothing has been resolved, but we've been taken to an interesting, uncommon place.