By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Joshua (2007, ***)
Documentarian George Ratliff’s fiction debut, Joshua, a variation on any number of bad seed-born-to-good-folk terrors, such as The Good Son and The Omen, does one thing very right in its cruel, clockwork machinations: the hiring of Benoit Debie as cinematographer. Debie’s work on Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2002), Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence (2004) and especially, Julia Loktev’s minimalist Day Night Day Night (currently in release), is stellar. While Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga do the so-simple-I-can’t-fool-a-kid turn to a whimpering T, and Jacob Kogan as the 9-year-old savant-of-slaughter and “weird son” by his own description, who boasts one of the scariest sets of bangs in recent movies and kittens up a lot against his gay, composer uncle (Dallas Roberts), and the pains inflicted on a newborn would never be allowed against a pet in an American movie, Debie’s light-flooded interiors, sly camera moves and inventively chosen focal lengths, convey moneyed Manhattan and privileged Brooklyn in a memorable mood of dread. (The editing is unpredictable as well, not in a jump-out-from-behind-the-door way, but in an unsettling one that’s a few frames sudden or elongated.) The ending is one of those rare ones that makes you reevaluate everything come before: when you realize one character’s motivation, the punchline to a song sung by a child (and written by Dave Matthews!), may make you first exclaim in surprise, and then perhaps, in frustration at the grotesquerie of the implications. Ratliff and co-writer David Gilbert have to know that the twist ending is much more than suggestive and will be more than noxious to a large percentage of its potential upscale audience. (Is this the movie’s selling point? The controversial ending you’re dying to give away?) Rockwell’s pretty terrific, despite his character’s stupidity, and Celia Weston is dreadfully good as fundamentalist grandma: she’s a fine enough actress not to mind playing a hateful character. (Much of the three-star rating I’ll attribute to Rockwell and to the look of the film.) [Ray Pride.]
