Cantoris-2

When a friend pointed out a preview on Youtube, my response was "cute but decadent." After seeing more clips and outtakes, the movie began to look promising, and I entered the cinema with high hopes, really wanting to like it.

Every boy nowadays should be well warned, before his first day of school one fears, that these are not the best of times to be one. He will have a long uphill fight and sooner or later be blamed and punished (not to mention drugged) for perfectly normal behavior. Feminism, whose claimed goal of "equality" rings hollower every year, has stacked the deck heavily against him. To name just one way: thanks to various educational practices, he now has at least 1/3 less chance than his female classmates of getting into college. Lotsa luck finding a feminist who will admit that this situation is in any way unjust, problematic, or unpropitious for society's future. Furthermore, he is best advised to postpone indefinitely a relationship with the opposite sex. This is the advice not of prudery but prudence, just as prudence avoids Russian roulette. Read the not-so-fine print about the probability of divorce, who usually initiates it, and the usual fate of a husband in family court-- assuming that a relationship even gets as far as marriage before a guy is me-tooed. In summary: Masculinity itself is toxic, haven't you heard?

So a film whose title asserts that there is even such a thing as a good boy and undertakes a sympathetic look at his life should make a welcome contribution to the culture. But lamentably, in this case it stops there. With a heavy sigh, I must return to my verdict at first sight.

By "decadent" I'm not referring to a decline in morals. Yeah, way too much dirty language comes out of these youngsters' mouths. Once in awhile it is funny or otherwise purposeful, but usually just gratuitous. As Peter Hitchens wrote, some people use profanity for punctuation, and one suspects that it is the only punctuation they know. Never was there a sillier misnomer than calling it "strong language." It is actually weak language. And this applies to screenplays as well. Although I would not exaggerate it as a moral violation, it is a tangible example of decadence: a line has been crossed in a very cheap manner, after which what in this way can anyone do for an encore?

Otherwise, this film is conspicuously moral. Look at the checklist. Racial equality, check: one of the three close friends among our young protagonists is African-American. Drugs, check: don't take them or deal them, and at least consider reporting anyone who does. Sex, check: get a girl's consent before making a move. And when you're eleven years old, daydream about giving a girl a kiss someday. Sweet.

No, by decadence I have in mind an artistic crudity, insincerity, and shameless loss of subtlety and craft that eventually becomes a race to the bottom. After just five minutes I was thinking, "this director doesn't know how to make a feature film." But it's been awhile since I've even bothered to see a Hollywood movie on account of the same traits, so maybe he's a typical contemporary Hollywood director, how should I know? Am I just showing my age?

The issue is style. First, the pacing is absurdly frenetic throughout. Second, these boys simply screamed much of their dialogue. Given the highly competitive market for child actors, I'm sure that casting came up with more talent than we see here-- if they didn't, it's sheer incompetence again. More likely, the star trio has talent but the director never brought it out of them. The occasional exceptions to the yelling appear in tender scenes, which come up abruptly: Suddenly the camera pans into a close-up and the music changes. Now This Is A Tender Scene, See? Then after a moment it's back to the razzle-dazzle rat-race. Put all this together and you get utter failure to suspend a viewer's disbelief. The effect is reminiscent of minimalist music which is obnoxious when it takes a moment that sounds like a symphony orchestra's reaching the climax of a score, and then repeats the passage twenty times, so that it all becomes a spoof.

For those who enjoyed this movie: fine, more power to you, I won't hold it against you. But do you have any idea what a starvation diet you are subsisting on? Will another film about this age group ever rival Stand By Me (1986)? For my money, Hearts in Atlantis (2001) almost stands by it. Granted, Gene Stupnisky's aim in Good Boys was more comic. But even effective comedy requires having summoned some emotional involvement with plot and characters. If it's not irreverent to suggest comparing it against these two predecessors, doing so will make it obvious how signally he failed.

Anyone attending a graduation ceremony at the American Boychoir School, as I did a few hours before seeing this film in Princeton, would be impressed with its tremendous and infectious school spirit. It is a joyous group of young people who uphold one another and love being together. Their enthusiasm has been buoyed up, and deservedly so, by the choir's glowing work in this film. As others have already noted, the singing is glorious, and one hopes is an audience's most lasting takeaway.

One's heart goes out to Stet, at first sight perhaps not the kind of boy one would expect to be smitten to the core within a moment of hearing such music. But he was! Given a chance to join, he is afraid to try at first, because failure and rejection would hurt so much. Time and again, it was the exquisite beauty of what he heard around him that drove him on, even when it seemed out of reach.

Aside from that-- I very much wanted to love this movie more than I'm ultimately able to do. Especially given its every suggestion that it is a portrayal of life in the American Boychoir School (or any choral foundation for that matter), we must bear in mind, IT IS FICTION! For according to the movie, this is a grim life in a hostile place, in which a boy might find no friends, no teamwork, and even a faculty member or two implacably opposed to his very presence. We see only merciless competition and rivalry, sometimes descending to unscrupulous malice for which the guilty peer gets only a slap on the wrist. This is not the stuff of which a great ensemble, as the American Boychoir clearly is, can be made. Alas, in this respect I fear that the scriptwriter and director have done a disservice to the art and institution that they meant to promote.

This is a serious matter at a time when plenty of choir school graduates go on to the most prestigious high schools in the country, and plenty of parents dream of exactly this outcome from the moment their child is born. To a large extent, it is the immersion in great music that does this. Yet the dots don't get connected: there is a shortage of applicants to choir schools, among other excellent boarding schools for children of this age, both here and abroad. Interested families understandably want to be assured that they will find a supportive, nurturing atmosphere in which every pupil is almost guaranteed to flourish happily. This is what such schools provide, as their students and alumni enthusiastically report. Reading music is patiently taught, not a prerequisite for admission. But you'd never guess it from the film.

If others feel that this single reservation I have expressed is too harsh, nothing would please me more. Boy goes to choir school and becomes a success. "Predictable", people say, as if this were a criticism. But oh how right they are.

Having somehow missed all the media coverage of the Brandon<->Teena murder case when it occurred, I watched this film unaware that it was based on a true story. After slogging the entire way through the ugly, depressing, predictable ending; and wondering what, beyond its undoubted brilliance in acting and cinematography, was the point, I discovered this fact only by reading on the screen, just before the credits rolled, that the perps were serving life sentences. Oh. That changes everything. Or does it?

My hypothesis was confirmed, incidentally, that (with just a few exceptions such as the refreshingly un-PC _About_a_Boy_) the unlikeliest recent book or movie to feature a real boy character is one with the word "boy" in the title. Have you noticed?

Being transgendered must be a very difficult card to be dealt in life, much more painful than being merely gay. Brandon easily won my sympathy on those grounds, but it was strained by the company he chose to keep. The moral of this story is very clear: Any young person with his condition and lack of career ties, with or without his stated ambition to live in Memphis or some-such metropolis, should head there immediately-- by sticking out a thumb on the highway if necessary-- rather than hanging around small towns in the American "heartland."

There is a reason why gay people are such a presence in New York and San Francisco, and why they gravitate to urbane "cultural" occupations: while we will inevitably encounter individuals who don't like us very much, at least they are civilized enough not to stoop to actual mayhem and murder. And there's a reason why "civilized" derives from the Latin for "city". We have appreciated this for decades if not centuries. Many of us have also read _Lord_of_the_Flies. In this sense, the adjective "disturbing" for this film and its denouement is not only a cliché but a curiously naive one. Would someone who finds the word insightful please elaborate as to which of their assumptions it has disturbed?

There is some cold comfort, I suppose, in pondering that social developments may soon, for awhile, make Teena's affliction obsolete. Other than semen, whose necessity biological research has not yet managed to eliminate, there is less and less said for maleness. One reads, for example, of a revival of beekeeping as a hobby. Is it surprising that many of the revivalists are women who readily explain how they admire the social structure of the hive? From the queen on down, most of the work is done by females. The drones are luxuries, grown in great numbers during prosperous times, but idle, powerless (literally with no sting), and summarily banished and left to starve or freeze as soon as the weather changes.

In the post-industrial West, too, women's liberation means the ability to go anywhere and do anything, reducing masculinity to ornamental pastimes (often via tough and noisy motor vehicles) which our feckless Johns, Toms, and Brandons pursue with ever-more-desperate swagger. They may live in a midwestern backwater (which Mark Twain, I think, said would be the best place to be when the world is ending, because everything happens ten years later), but even they are by now children of their time.

In one regard, however, Brandon's instincts were old-fashioned: when appealing to the "opposite" sex, he was all courtesy and chivalry-- and, despite having from all appearances yet to reach puberty, this approach was successful. Maybe there's hope yet.