Luce

I liked the movie - but was kind of confused about exactly the point. This would be a good movie for an English Class to dissect the different themes going on. I would say it hits upon the pressure parents and teachers put on teen role models (especially African American role models). Everyone wanted this kid to succeed so badly that it led to many instances of lying and deceit on the part of students, teachers, parents and administration. It also is a commentary on issues around foreign adoption and the difficulties both the parents and kids can go through. It touches on school politics and how things can get swept under the rug when people or their actions don't fit into the image they are trying to project. I wish the movie would have just touched on one of these issues and stuck with it...I was kind of bouncing around trying to figure out the main point. As I said earlier...this would be a great case study for an English or Theater class.

The collective performance of this ensemble is something else.

SYNOPSIS: Luce (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) is your ideal son/student/role model. Star of the track team and the student you expect to make the commencement speech for his college graduation. However, with a tension forming between Luce and his teacher Ms. Wilson (Octavia Spencer) things begin to get stranger as you're forced to question whether Luce's intentions are pure or cynical.

DIRECTION: Julius Onah captures an atmosphere that just about suffocates you with suspicion and tension. Onah really makes you feel a few of his scenes due to angles and positions that manipulates your thoughts the same way Harrison Jr. does with his performance. Not the most unique direction, but good enough to elevate the film.

WRITING: What's so hard about reviewing this film is I can't tell what it was that really affected me whether it was the Directing, Writing, Acting or all of the above. This film itself is a manipulation. I think a large part of this is due to the writing. It's so precise and at times maybe too precise where it can be unbelievable at times.

ACTING: Kelvin Harrison Jr.. I could leave this at that, which is crazy because the rest of the ensemble was SO good. What the fluff is going on with these performances not getting any Oscar buzz? Just because you expect damn near perfect performances from a Naomi Watts and Tim Roth means they don't deserve to be talked about? Honestly, I'll chalk this up to poor marketing. This might be the least marketed film of the year with star power like that. I only knew of this film due to one trailer I saw from a film way back. Anyway, if I had my choice of Kelvin "The Ultimate Manipulator" Harrison Jr. being nominated for Best Actor, he would be right behind Adam Driver. Some short, but affective performances from Andrea Bang and Holy shift it's Astro from the US edition of The X Factor.

CONCLUSION: This is a really well made film from Julius Onah and incredible performances from the entire ensemble. Wasn't enough to get 4/5 stars just because it didn't reach a level I really saw this film having the potential to reach. If you're looking for strong acting and tense dialogue this is a perfect fit for you.

Outstanding score - it goes to show you how easily it can make or break a film. Casting and performances were great. Cinematography and directing were decent, but the writing/screenplay was unnecessarily convoluted and underwhelming in trying to create mystery and suspense, but instead presented a half-baked misfire of a plot. The slow pacing and choppy plot made the 109 min run-time feel like 3 hours. Luce missed a huge opportunity to be something great had it had more substance than filler. It's a very generous 6/10 from me.

In Trump's America, such as it is, issues such as race, gender, and class have become more incendiary topics than they've been in years. It's a house divided against itself, and it's the setting for Luce, a film which examines a myriad of these issues. Adapted from the play of the same name by J.C. Lee, Luce was written for the screen by Lee and Julius Onah, and directed by Onah. Tackling all manner of hot-button issues, including race, class, gender, power, privilege, #MeToo, academic achievement, stereotypes, liberal elitism, even revolutionary rhetoric and the importance of language in encoding societal/political power structures, it also works as a thriller about a young man who may, or may not, be a dangerous sociopath posing as the embodiment of the American Dream. Without question it asks a lot of the audience, meaning some simply won't want to put in the effort. It's by no means perfect - it's too long, lapses into repetition, and it spreads itself too thin thematically - but, by and large, this is strong work, with plenty to say to those willing to listen.

In Arlington, VA, 17-year-old Luce Edgar (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) is the adopted son of Peter (Tim Roth) and Amy (Naomi Watts). Born in Eritrea, Luce spent the first seven years of his life as a child soldier. However, with the love of his adopted parents and a lot of therapy, he has grown into an exceptional young man; all-star athlete, captain of the debating team, all-round honour student. However, when his history teacher Harriet Wilson (Octavia Spencer), who has a reputation for being harder on black students, gives an assignment to write from the perspective of a revolutionary, Luce chooses Frantz Fanon, the Pan-Africanist writer who argued that colonialism could only be defeated by violence. Disturbed by Luce's apparent endorsement of Fanon's theories, Wilson searches his locker without his permission (something she has also done to other students), finding powerful fireworks, and so sets out to convince the Edgars that their son may be dangerous. Luce, however, has no intention of letting her do so.

In a film which takes in countless themes, one of the most prevalent is race, especially the notion of differences in black identity - both Wilson and Luce are black, but Luce is also an immigrant with a vastly different frame of socio-political reference. Sure, he has experienced great hardships, but since arriving in the US, he's been relatively sheltered (to quote Onah, "Luce's proximity to whiteness affords him certain privileges that other black characters don't enjoy"). Wilson, for her part, is a child of the 60s, with direct experience of the Civil Rights Movement. However, perhaps because of this, she subscribes to respectability politics, seeing all black people as sharing a common bond. This is one of the things against which Luce pushes back most strongly - he disagrees that there's such a thing as a monolithic black identity, refusing to conform to Wilson's conception of what a successful black student should be. To conform to preconceived and idealised notions would be to define himself on other peoples' terms, in a manner not entirely dissimilar from the very inequalities against which the Civil Rights Movement was a reaction.

And, of course, it's important not to forget that amidst all the ideological differences between Luce and Wilson, their initial conflict is a more tangible one - after writing a paper about violence, he's profiled in a way that a white student would not be. The fact that Wilson herself is black is irrelevant to this - she reads what he says about violence and she assumes he shares Fanon's sentiments, and hence could very well be dangerous. In this way, the film deconstructs the concept of the "model immigrant" - the immigrant who must prove their harmlessness and demonstrate their potential to contribute before they can be accepted by society at large. But is such a requirement of assimilation just another form of racial profiling?

One of the things the film does especially well is toy with audience expectations. Wilson, like much of society, seems to think of Luce in binary terms - he's either a bastion of what's possible in the land of dreams or he's violent and dangerous. Cinema audiences too are conditioned to think in such binaries - we want ambiguous characters such as Luce to ultimately be revealed as one thing or the other. However, Onah knows that people will scan the text to find clues to confirm this notion or that notion, and he delights in complicating that process at every turn - when a grinning Luce mentions fireworks to Wilson, is he threatening her or is it an innocent reference to the Fourth of July; when an amiable Luce meets Wilson and her drug-addict sister Rosemary (a stunning performance by Marsha Stephanie Blake) in a supermarket, is it a coincidence or did he follow them?

I'd be remiss here if I didn't talk a little about the acting, which is universally exceptional. Just when you think you've got Luce figured out, Harrison gives a sly glance, a slight smile, a shift in body language, which completely dismantles your theory. In a part that's very, very wordy, some of Harrison's best acting concerns Luce's subtle non-verbal traits. Spencer is equally good in the role of Wilson, whom she plays as far more on the surface than Harrison's Luce. However, so too does she exhibit a degree of ambivalence - we're often not sure if she's acting out of genuine concern for the school or is instead being vindictive towards a student whose thinking she has been unable to bend to her own.

In terms of problems, the audience has to do a lot of the leg work, and it's something which will be immediately distasteful to some, especially those who demand rigid binaries and clear explanations from their narratives. Personally, I loved the inherent ambiguity, but I understand that some won't. The same is true of many of the themes, which tend to be raised in something of a phenomenological vacuum, exiting almost as hypotheticals rather than prescribed answers, and again asking the audience to connect some of the dots. More of a problem for me was that the film ran a good 20 minutes longer than necessary, with much of the dramatic tension slackening in the last act. It's also prone to repetition - seen most clearly in Peter and Amy's constant back and forths and the dialogue scenes between Luce and Wilson. The film also features a few too many issues, several of which are taken virtually nowhere. A subplot involving a possible sexual assault at a party, for example, pays lip-service to many of the tenets of #MeToo but does very little beyond that.

Nevertheless, I was impressed with Luce. What it says about the US's (in)ability to engage in meaningful dialogue regarding important socio-political topics isn't flattering, but it is compelling. Essentially a film about pressure, as exerted by parents, by schools, by teachers, by friends, by society, by oneself, it's at least partly an exposé on the bitter divisions inherent in Trump's America. It does spread itself a little thin and the ambiguity won't be to everyone's taste, but this is brave filmmaking with a lot on its mind.

A confusing, conflicting & cryptic thriller that plays with our perceptions to challenge our preconceptions, Luce clearly intends on starting a conversation but it also does the bare minimum to make it happen as the film expects the audience to figure out the mystery yet doesn't provide a starting point to get them going.

Co-written & directed by Julius Onah (The Cloverfield Paradox), the film is certainly an improvement over his previous dud and is captivating in its narration that tackles parent anxieties, assumption, suspicion, biases & guilt, but much of what it wants to say is lost in translation, and the ambivalent ending doesn't help the cause either.

There are a lot of things that are left unresolved by the end, and even the cast does too well to not let anything slip away. Kelvin Harrison Jr. chips in with a multifaceted input that keeps us guessing at all times. Both Naomi Watts & Tim Roth do good as his concerned parents. Andrea Bang easily steals her scenes, and Octavia Spencer is brilliant as usual.

Overall, Luce is a deliberately complex yet sufficiently engaging drama that asks a lot of questions but refuses to answer any of them. What keeps the interest alive is our very own curiosity to discern the truth, and the anticlimactic end leaves behind an underwhelming aftertaste. Still, for its strong performances & thought-provoking treatment, Luce is worth a shot.