What Grown-Ups Know

It starts as a very easy summer short film. And it gives, scene by scene, pieces of a touching story about motherhood, loneliness, teen agitated/ manipulative life , a caravan park manager . Gentle and precise portrait of a tinny world, it is just perfect mix of melancholia and bitter taste of falls, sketch of hope and embroidery of cold loneliness.

Based on a short story written by the director's best friend, the film follows Roy (21-year-old, talented actor Stephen James King, who looks all of 15) and his slut of a mother, Elizabeth, on a cross-country flight from Roy's father.

Elizabeth (beautiful veteran actress Susie Lindeman, amazingly transformed into a consumptive, turkey-necked hag) is part hooker, part insecure psychotic, part drunk and very, very ill. Her teenage son, Roy, is a cute boy who has an Oedipal attachment to his mother. Just why they are on the road won't be explained until the film's final moments.

We first see the two as they flee a motel without paying the bill. They later take a break at a rest stop, where Roy's homosexual desires come flooding to the surface at the sight of sex-hungry, lonely, predatorial men cruising for fresh meat. Roy attempts to solicit sex from a man in a restroom stall, but his mother's calls force him to forego gratification. Roy and Elizabeth soon arrive at an almost-abandoned trailer park, where the park owner is the same man Roy almost had sex with earlier.

Elizabeth and Roy convince the man, Maurice (played with broken-down despair by the terrific Aussie TV and film actor Daniel Roberts), to let them stay so long as Roy remains at the trailer park during the day. It's Christmas, which Down Under means steaming hot weather. Elizabeth gets a job as a department store Santa, while Roy attempts to seduce Maurice. But Maurice is having none of it. Elizabeth's worsening illness threatens to cost her her job, and the money she needs to pay Maurice the rent on their broken-down trailer. So Elizabeth gives Maurice her wedding ring.

Losing the symbol of his parents' marriage is too much for Roy, who desperately wants the world to be perfect and secure. He finally seduces Maurice. Roy learns that Maurice, too, once had a family. But when his wife learned of his homosexuality, she accused him of molesting their young boy and divorced him. When Elizabeth, too, attempts to seduce Maurice, Roy cannot believe his eyes. But Maurice rejects her.

Elizabeth attempts to flee the trailer park in pride, and Roy tells her that he's seduced Maurice and finally found someone to love. Elizabeth spits back that no man will ever love Roy, just as Roy's father never loved her.

And then the awful truth comes out: Roy's father rejected Elizabeth when she became ill (with cancer? with HIV?). She took the pills, she did the treatments...and then her hair fell out and he kicked her out. Roy refuses to believe his mother. He flees to Maurice, who tells Roy that he cannot love him and that Roy should return to his mother. She's dying, and needs him. Devastated, Roy does the only thing he can: He returns to his mother and admits that he, too, has been rejected by a man. Comrades in arms once more, Elizabeth takes her son back.

This short film may, at first, seem luridly melodramatic: The rejected and ill mother, the teenaged son looking for a man's love to provide security in the world, the wrongly accused homosexual father who sees in a teenager a chance to regain the son he lost, the trailer parks, the illness, the two whores (mother and son). But it's not. The characterization is deft and detailed.

Elizabeth seems a caricature of a human being, but it is an act -- one she drops when she finally has to stop pretending and confront Roy with the truth about his father and her oncoming death. It is wrenching, watching a human being adopt the most deranged and fantastic behavior in order to cling to hope.

Stephen James King's performance as Roy, however, is the real centerpiece of the film. On screen in almost every scene, he portrays Roy as human but troubled. The depth of Roy's insecurity -- of his deep-rooted, almost insane, need for love -- only slowly becomes apparent in King's performance. As Roy reacts to Maurice's presence, his painful, aching need rises to the surface.

The film's climax is superbly well-written, and works beautifully to bring the pieces together sensibly and meaningfully. Elements of the film which seem incurably silly or unreal (particularly Elizabeth's baby-talk, nick-names for Roy, and obsessively slutty behavior) are transformed into powerfully moving characterizations. In some ways, I was reminded of the absurd characters in Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh" -- cardboard caricatures at first, but later seen as deeply troubled, despairing human beings coping as best they can with a world which has torn them apart and left them hopeless.

This is really a terrific film.

Roy's mom and dad have split and Roy and his mom are on the road. They are struggling to make ends meet, skipping out on motel bills and earning money in a series of dead end jobs. As if life on the road isn't hard enough Roy is struggling with his growing awareness that he's gay.

His two problems mix when he encounters a man in a public toilet and then recognizes him again as the owner of the caravan park where Roy and his mother have settled in. Roy is inexperienced and deeply confused but he thinks he's got an idea of how he and his mom can make the rent...

This coming of age short was well conceived and started off well but became a bit depressing and muddled toward the end. I'm unclear whether the story was the problem or whether it was the way that the story was presented but I am certainly interested in seeing the director's other efforts.