Dazed and
confessed

>> Teen angst looks mighty banal in The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

by MATTHEW HAYS

Having grown up in the ’70s, I can cite a couple of films that capture the period bang on. I’m thinking Dazed and Confused and Virgin Suicides.

With its melancholic, best-of-times and worst-of-times backward gaze through time, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys feels like director Peter Care’s effort to come close to these previous coming-of-age visions of the decade. Based on Chris Fuhrman’s novel, the film has two naughty Catholic schoolboys (Emile Hirsch and Kieran Culkin) navigate their way through the rough turbulence of adolescence. Their tight bonding among a group of friends makes life’s downers easier to deal with; among them, the uptight, repressed, one-legged nun (played, believe it or not, by Jodie Foster) who tries to make their existences a living hell. Culkin, in particular, clashes with this nun and clearly has wicked authority issues.
Enter a love interest, a plot kink involving incest, jealous rivalries and yet more rebellious anti-Catholic-hierarchy posturing. In its most audacious formal deviance, Altar Boys has animated sequences, in which the adolescents fantasize about being cartoon superheroes who square off against Foster (who’s drawn as a super-villainess). These are the film’s best moments, full of pubescent fantasy and rage against repression.

It’s the rest of the film that could use a lift or a shot in the arm or a fire under its ass or, in a best-case scenario, all of the above. Really, I sensed very little danger nor much life in the general proceedings. The characters mope along, feeling generally oppressed by their anal-retentive upbringing and lack of true freedom. True to form, the film has an obligatory tragic ending—and I’m giving nothing away here by revealing it as it arrives with all the subtlety of a two by four with nails sticking out of it.

The kids aren’t bad at all in this film, though I confess to being prejudiced about any young thespian bearing the Culkin surname. As I gaze upon his face on the screen, all I can think of is his big brother, the former family breadwinner Macaulay. The vestiges of the former child star can be seen so clearly. It creates the sense of looking at something that was so distinctive but that’s not quite there any more.

Which reflects the sense of The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys itself. The film feels a pale imitation of something that came long ago but isn’t quite living up to its yesteryear aspirations. This is nostalgia lite. Much as it may want to be, Dangerous Lives is no Virgin Suicides, no Dazed and Confused. :

The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys opens Friday, June 21