Un élève doué

Directed by Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects and both X-Men features), Apt Pupil is a story of adolescent curiosity and evil intentions. Ian McKellen (X-Men) plays the role of an aged, former Nazi soldier living alone in a quiet town with Brad Renfro (Sleepers) as a young, high school teenager in the search of finding the truth about Nazi life in wartime Germany.

Adapted from the Stephen King novella of the same name, Apt Pupil is a psychological thriller with an Alfred Hitchcock-like presence, leaving quite a bit to the viewer's imagination. Much like a game of cards, the action moves back and forth between characters, each trying to take control of one another. While Kurt Dussander (McKellen) wants to keep his past in the past, Todd Bowden (Renfro) keeps probing (and sometimes threatening) to unleash the stories of the reign of Hitler and the torture of the Jews.

While this movie is much like other Stephen King-adapted novels in the sense that it doesn't always translate well to the big screen (with all of the little nuances that made King famous), the superb acting and directing makes Apt Pupil a worthwhile venture into the nature of mental wickedness. Both Singer's vision and McKellen's portrayal of Nazi war criminal bring excitement and intrigue to this movie making it a must-see.

Before I even start my review of this movie (which I liked) I gotta say "Apt Pupil" has got to be the goofiest name for a story since the hilarious 30 Rock spoof "Rural Juror". Say it 10 times fast and you'll feel like you just came back from the dentist.

Anyhoo...

There have been many films and books that attempt to explain the horror that we humans are capable of. While I haven't read the Stephen King nouvelle "Apt Pupil", I can tell you this film adaptation kept my attention and tossed around some new ideas I hadn't really considered.

If you haven't already seen it, search for the Stanley Milgram experiment. It was a psychological test done by a Yale student back in the 1960s offering one of the most chilling explanations for the phenomenon of Nazism, a convincing illustration of how humans can do horrific things. The gist is that we convince ourselves that we're doing what we're supposed to be doing ("just following orders" or "everyone told me to do it"). The video is online on dailymotion.

"Apt Pupil" surprised me by taking a very different approach which I won't ruin for you. I'll just say that it weaves a complex Machiavellian scheme, where evil is deliberate and conscious of itself. It finds its footing by creating a balance of power, reminiscent of the "mutual assured destruction" philosophy in the 80s that led the USA and Russia to stockpile enough nukes to send us to the Smurf universe.

OK, enough background. Let's talk about the film already. If the premise doesn't capture you instantly, the impressive directing and musical score should suck you in with its heavy, foreboding mood. Ian McKellan (probably best known as Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings but also an accomplished Shakespearean actor) is excellent in the role of an ex- Nazi... a menacing enigma somewhere between a serial killer and a cranky grandfather.

Brad Renfro appears on screen as the perfect naïve kid with a perpetual deer-in-the- headlights expression, sort of like John Cusack in the 80s but without the laughs. The film focuses mainly on the transformation of Renfro's character. It's here where I was unconvinced, and I docked the film a point or 2. Renfro's character mutates so suddenly and drastically you'd think he sucked down some radioactive sludge. I feel a lot of his "experiments with evil" were uncharacteristic and thrown in for shock value. No matter how curious a person is, nobody goes from Pollyanna to animal mutilations in just a month or two. It was this seemingly random, inexplicable moral decay which I felt was just injected for cheap shock value. If you can get past that, the real theme emerges.

The root of human evil, according to "Apt Pupil," is not random moral decay but actually a complex struggle for power. When this theme emerged in the latter half, that's when I perked up and paid attention. The story then takes on a suspenseful air, and the kid & the Nazi get into an interesting game of cat & mouse.

Overall, I'll stick with the Stanley Milgram experiment for the most convincing explanation of human atrocities. But "Apt Pupil" definitely delivers some food for thought. Another film that provides insight is the criminally underrated "Exorcist III" with George C. Scott and Brad Dourif playing mind games in an insane asylum. Also check out the documentary "Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer," or on the lighter side, "Dr. Strangelove" makes an interesting commentary on why humans commit genocide. Who knows why humans kill, maim and torture. But as long as we keep investigating there may be hope for us.

I sincerely hope Imdb is merely falsely reporting a rumor that Stephen King sold the film rights to Apt Pupil for $1, because Apt Pupil is one of the worst screen adaptations of a King novel. It ranks up there with Children of the Corn and, perhaps ironically worst of all, King's "Maximum Overdrive."

Apt Pupil is one of the most chilling King works I've ever read with only Children of the Corn being scarier. It's a cat-and-mouse story of a cocky, smart American kid who discovers that man who lives near him is actually a fugitive NAZI--one of the evil high-ranking officers that has thwarted the authorities for decades. But instead of doing the obvious right thing and turning him in, the boy engages in a deadly quid-pro-quo game of blackmail: he tells "Arthur Denker"--real name Kurt Dussander--to tell him everything that is too explicit for the war books and magazines.

The novel has a very dark ending, which you'd expect when a person makes a critically terrible decision and then tries endlessly to cover it up. This movie almost completely sanitizes it. Further, Brad Renfro was a horrible miscast as Todd Bowden. He acts nothing like the Bowden in the book. The pacing for this film was all wrong and never allows any of the characters to sufficiently develop. Only Ian McKellan and the well-intentioned efforts of David Schwimmer save this film from being a total skunk.

"Apt Pupil" is well directed, with some interesting themes of power lust and evil feeding on itself, and great acting by Brad Renfro and Sir Ian McKellan, but I was put off by the very loose holds on reality. The plot alone is full of insane coincidences (a kid obsessed with the Holocaust just happens to bump into a Nazi war criminal, and that war criminal just happens to share a hospital room with one of his victims), but even the characterizations are a stretch. Renfro's character is very odd, and there is no given reason for why he is so naturally evil. And while it is hard enough to accept that McKellan would be bursting with evil 40 years later, with no hint of remorse (or even insight) about his past, it is completely ridiculous to assume he would be spending his evenings gassing cats and killing homeless people. The direction and acting make it worth watching, but in the end, I just couldn't take this overly serious movie seriously.

The underlying theme Apt Pupil maintains throughout is attention to texts and attention to texts that can inspire and influence but for all the wrong reasons. Apt Pupil does not have a set up; it jumps right into its narrative from the very beginning as close to perfect student Todd Bowden (Renfro) sits there having gone through a lecture on the infamous Holocaust that took place during the 1930s and 40s in Central and Eastern Europe. Todd looks disturbed and yet intrigued at the same time; the opening credits roll after the teacher rubs out 'Jews' written on the chalk board, with the credits doubling up as a montage as Todd goes deeper and deeper into the history of the Holocaust and picks up on lots of information.

From here, Todd has had his mind polluted with a text he has done every attempt to read up on and is now in a different sort of mindset but since we did not know him before the film started, it is his psyche that has been attributed to him. Similarly to the American couple who went on a spree after seeing Badlands; similarly to the French couple who shot and robbed a liquor store after seeing Natural Born Killers and similarly to the hoodlums in Britain who dressed up and beat tramps after seeing A Clockwork Orange, media texts and texts in general can inspire and influence. Todd's story is a study of this and it become doubly dangerous when he realises local neighbour Kurt Dussander (McKellan) is an ex-Nazi in hiding.

From this intriguing set up comes a film that unfolds at a satisfying pace, delivers shocks and the odd surprise whilst maintaining a healthy amount of suspense. The film spends most of its first third informing us that the Holocaust was a 'bad thing' with its trailing off of stories that Kurt delivers to Todd and its dream sequences that Todd must endure. But at the same time, this only further emphasises Todd's fascination and displays how vulnerable he really is. There are two scenes in which Todd hallucinates about the Holocaust; one of which is when he is peering into a window at a dying Jew who cries out for help but Todd awakes in a cold sweat – he didn't enjoy it. The second of which takes place in the shower when he imagines he is a Jew himself. But he snaps out of it and pants in relief it's over.

These reactions display fear and anxiety toward such visions but it is not long before he is treating friends like dirt, participating in animal cruelty and wanting to witness first hand a Nazi drill from the real thing. There are two symmetrical scenes during which both Todd and Kurt partake in animal cruelty emphasising that Todd is perhaps entering the mindset of a Nazi whilst one who has already been there and been one also tries his hand at animal cruelty – disturbingly fitting how it involved an oven. But at this point, Todd has already bordered on the insane since his readings of the subject and the stories of the ex-Nazi have deterred him from the straight and narrow; it echoes the scene in Taxi Driver when Travis pretends to 'shoot' the porn stars on the screen in the cinema – he has seen the filth and the bare bones of the subject first hand and is now building up a fascination; albeit and 'anti' fascination as opposed to Todd's fascination which makes him want to hurt, upset and maim.

And so as the film progresses, so does the intrigue and the deception. One of the films more memorable scenes involves a homeless man who for one reason or another gets in on the blackmail and believes he'll be permitted to stay at Kurt's house given a twist that occurs. Kurt may have other ideas and the scene in which he strokes the man's bald head (probably echoing the way he did for the Jews following their head shaving) is tense and unnerving. But the student/pupil relationship takes a bizarre route and Todd buys Kurt a uniform, demanding to see him in it and demanding a performance – I don't think there is much of a homo-erotic 'gaze' that follows but there is certainly a lot more 'I'll look out for you, you look out for me' emphasis and everything gets a little more 'touchy-feely' if you know what I mean.

Despite, in my opinion, one of the biggest mis-castings in a film from last decade; David Schwimmer turns up with a silly looking moustache and some tacky looking glasses and plays a school counsellor. His presence adds another ingredient to the boiling pot but just when the game looks up in a forgettable scene, Todd is quite literally saved by the bell. Then there are the lingering close ups of the handshakes, the creepy smile and those eyes behind those glasses – is there something we should know? Apt Pupil is engaging and good fun for what it is but there are some sloppy scenes and some incidental occurrences but what good there is, is either nerve jangling, tense or unpredictable.