The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
Thirteen in America
This site is dedicated to the proposition that not all movie reviews are created equal, any more than all movies are. It is my goal here to demonstrate that the movie review can be a quasi-literary art form, that there is a place within the movie review for the occasional lyric piece, the occasional parody, the occasional confessional, the occasional venom-filled tirade. Let others worry about plot points and casting and production details and other minutiae. If I want to write a poem about a movie, or demonstrate how, say, Aimee Mann’s soundtrack for Magnolia applies across several movies like Memento and Vanilla Sky, I am free to do that. This site is about something more, something deeply personal, and hopefully, occasionally, hopefully, something beautiful now and again.
However, there are movies where this approach doesn’t work worth beans, and The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is one of them. Because this is such a small movie, because it is being released during the summer, and because it is an exceptional film, it stands a good chance of being ignored — primarily by those who would benefit most from the movie. In this instance, a fact-based, non-personal approach is warranted, primarily to get people to seek out the movie and to recommend it to others.
The first series of facts have to do with the misconceptions about the movie itself. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is probably the second most unfortunately timed movie about the summer, falling only behind The Sum of All Fears in that regard. Rest assured, the danger in the lives of the altar boys portrayed in the movie has nothing to do with any present news articles about the Catholic Church in general or about abuse by priests in specific. The movie is a period piece about the late 1970’s and has little or nothing to do with those sad events. It even has little to do with the Catholic Church itself; the movie has a universal appeal that crosses religious lines. (Catholic-school graduates may find it funnier than the rest of us, but there is much to enjoy for even the most chicken-fried Southern Baptist.)
The next issue with The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is the combination of a thoughtful coming-of-age movie with animated scenes designed by the comic-book artist Todd McFarland, best known for the movie Spawn. After the woeful use of animation with live-action in the recent Attack of the Clones, the audience should be forgiven any skittishness over the use of animation here. The characters, though, do not interact at all with the animation, which exists primarily to comment on the story and to let us know what the main character thinks about the action. (At a Q&A session following the screening I attended at the Atlanta Film Festival, director Peter Care said that the alternative to the animation was a voice over a’la The Wonder Years, so the animation was an excellent choice.) McFarland’s animation is first-rate, dark and edgy, but still conveying some of the innocence and immaturity of the source material. (It is very graphic and violent; leave the little kids at home, please.)
The final issue is the most difficult to deal with; the misconception that The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is a teen movie. Unfortunately, the currency of the teen movie has been devalued so badly of late that one expects that a movie that focuses on teenagers is going to be silly, sex-obsessed, lowest-common-denominator material. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys does feature characters doing silly, self-destructive things, and drug and alcohol use, and some steamy moments, but it is as far from the standard Hollywood teenage comedy as can be. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is a thoughtful movie, a movie that is concerned with souls and risk and schemes and the consequences of one’s actions. Outside of Almost Famous and Billy Elliot, there hasn’t been a teenage movie this appealing, this smart, and this intelligent in years.
The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys focuses on best friends Tim Sullivan (Kieran Culkin) and Francis Doyle (Emile Hirsch), Catholic schoolboys, about thirteen years old, bored to death in a mid-sized town somewhere in America towards the close of the 1970’s. There are of yet no video games, no computers, no electronic distractions to keep Tim and Francis occupied. They focus their energies instead on drawing and creating a blasphemous comic book, “Atomic Trinity”, which features themselves and their friends as superheroes and the people around them as deep-dyed villains. (This is the source material for the McFarland animation, which, among other things, demonstrates just how vivid a scene in your mind can be and how hard it is to turn that vision into reality, especially if you’re dealing with notebook paper with those little blue lines on it.) This, in turn, helps inspire them to concieve and execute some boldly audacious pranks.
The main target for Tim and Francis is Sister Assumpta, the strict math teacher at their Catholic school, portrayed in their comic books as a motorcycle-riding demon from the Pit of Hell. Sister Assumpta is played by Jodie Foster in a solid, serious, no-nonsense performance that is likely, hands-down, the best performance that any actor has ever turned in while playing a nun. Foster is the exception to Joe Queenan’s observation that “there has never been a movie that accurately portrays nuns the way they really are.” Foster turns in a performance that is remarkable for its utter conventionality. It would have been very easy for her to showboat here, playing a nun who also has a disability, but she stays smart and disciplined and honest here. (The movie does uphold Queenan’s observation that the music in nun movies is uniformly wretched, here, we see Foster leading a singalong of “Kum Ba Yah”.)
The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is primarily about its male leads, but the most interesting characters are the women. Foster’s cool, quiet performance is matched by Jena Malone as Francis’s love interest. Malone was last seen in Life as a House as The Girl to Hayden Christiansen’s out-of-control teenage delinquent. She has a much better role here, and does a lot more with it. It is her character that moves the The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys forward; she is the movie’s real emotional center and is deeper, much more troubled than you might think. Malone turns in a memorable performance, thoughtful and aware.
What The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is really about, of course, is the altar boys themselves, and their coming of age. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys does many things well; it is very well directed, features some good performances, and conveys a sense of time and place beautifully. But what it does best is portray what boys are like when they are thirteen, and why so many of us never get over that. Culkin (as the pocket genius of the group) and Hirsch (as the brooding, artistic type) do a wonderful job in showing the audience what it is like to be thirteen in America. We hear the silly, pointed insults, deal with the awkwardness of being around girls, explore the mysteries of beer and comic books, and sit in on the laconic conversations about not much at all. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is a film worth seeking out for many reasons, but its insights on why men are the way we are make it special.