By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com
SIFF 2012 Review: Fat Kid Rules the World
I dug Fat Kid Rules the World a lot. I went into this screening thinking, “Oh, great. Jacob Lysocki’s playing a fat high school student again? And directed by Shaggy?” Aza Jacobs Terri was a great little film, in no small part due to Wysocki’s subtly wrenching performance as the depressed, overweight teen. So why make a movie that immediately evokes that by casting the same actor in a similar setting? But in all fairness, this is a completely different story, both in plot and tone, and Wysocki here is portraying a completely different, but equally nuanced fat kid. And Lillard, as it turns out, isn’t a half-bad director. Actually, he’s pretty darn good.
The kid here, Troy, wasn’t always a fat, unhappy kid. Once he was just a normal, happy, not-fat kid who loved his mom and dad and younger brother, Dayle (Dylan Arnold). Then his mom got sick and died, and Dayle got sad and depressed and took refuge in being a super-jock-future-pro-athelete-or-soldier type, excelling in every sport, shooting hoops with dad, and generally filling the void with trophies and medals and ribbons. Troy, on the other hand, got sad and depressed and self-medicated with food until he morphed into the fat, unhappy boy contemplating suicide by city bus when the movie opens. But Troy is saved by Marcus (Matt O’Leary), an equally bereft boy, a talented musician who looks a bit like the worn out ghost of Kurt Cobain. Certainly, he’s weary and wise beyond his years, the result of addictions of his own. And like Troy, he lost his mother, in his case, when she married a tough guy who kicked Marcus out of the house because of his addiction. These two lost, grieving, motherless boys, once they find each other, become the catalysts for each others’ change in sometimes mundane ways made quite remarkable through Lillard’s confident direction of his talented actors. Michelle Witten’s tight, snappy editing moves things along at a brisk pace, with very little in the way of story lag time to drag things down.
The real strength of Fat Kid, though, is Billy Campbell as Troy’s dad, Mr. Billings. He’s a stern dude, ex-military, so tightly buttoned he looks like he might explode. His mouth, compressed into a thin line from years of holding back grief, is almost expressionless, while the rest of his face is a study in anguish, carved in granite. This makes it so much more poignant when we get, for the first time, that this dad is not quite who we thought he was when first we met him; or rather he is, but he’s also something more. He reminds me, in a way, of the dad from Kat Candler’s excellent short film, Hellion (which also played at SIFF), but because we get to spend more time with Mr. Billings, we have the opportunity to peel back his layers and get to know him.
