Fathers and sons and Lolita

>> Foreplay for 14 year olds in Four Days

by JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN

In the low budget Canadian feature Four Days, a petty crook (William Forsythe) is killed during a botched robbery. His 14-year-old son (Kevin Zegers), not knowing his dad is dead, sets off on a road trip to meet him at a pre-arranged location.

Through his travels, the boy remains a wide-eyed blank slate (albeit a really cute one), while the adults he meets come off as pathetic blowhards delivering stagey monologues. Every time they speak, it feels like they're self-consciously shoving their way up to the edge of the stage to share the spotlight.

Things pick up at half time when The Kid hitches a ride with Lolita Davidovich. Piping hot with no place to go, she ends up coming off like Jane Fonda in full Barbarella gear doing a cameo on The Beachcombers.

So there's The Kid with a satchel fat with twenties, hanging out with a true-blue sexpot. It's every 14-year-old boy's dream (and--dare I say it?--perhaps every woman's secret pedophilic fantasy), and the director (first-timer Curtis Wehrfritz) wants to exploit the sexual tension--which there's plenty of--but doesn't seem to know what conclusion should be drawn from the relationship. He ends up relying instead on stock situations and film cliches.

Four Days feels like a decent short story which was pinched and prodded, perhaps unjustly, into cinematic existence. Visually, the film is pretty undynamic; the narration, provided by Forsythe, takes you by the hand and tells you what you should be thinking throughout.

The film's most powerful image occurs during The Kid's flashback: he recalls playing a mirror game with his dad in the archway of some welfare hotel room. In that moment, all of the The Kid's fascination with and fear of his father is present. Here we see the horror and beauty of the psychic bond that exists between father and son.

The image shows so much without having to shove you around and tell you what you should be extracting from it. It's also the kind of image that would have been just as resonant as prose--perhaps even more so, because it wouldn't have been stewed in emotive music and too much voice-over.

Four Days opens Friday, November 26