Tough to be a teen

While I continue to add films to a forthcoming grab-bag review, I just watched two standouts that make a distinctive pair, so I highlight them here.  They each feature a motherless kid, a girl and a boy at opposite ends of the country and circumstance, but equally emblematic of the difficulties of growing up in today’s America.

Two people lift Eighth Grade (MC-89, NFX) way, way above the normal run of teen comedies, writer-director Bo Burnham and star-in-the-making Elsie Fisher.  The former is a 27-year-old YouTube performer and stand-up comic who delivers an amazingly assured film debut.  The latter is a genuine 14-year-old, just out of middle school, who is awkward and endearing and utterly convincing.  He combines the eternal verities of excruciating adolescence with the up-to-date stresses of ubiquitous smartphones and social media.  She combines closed-in shyness with out-there bravado, and emerging beauty with residual gawkiness, as only a person truly in the throes of that particular transition could.  She’s both tongue-tied and articulate, full of understanding and without a clue.  Josh Hamilton deserves a shout-out as her too, too sympathetic dad.  Overall, this winning film offers a perfect mix of the amusing, the touching, and the cringe-inducing.

Lean on Pete (MC-80, AMZ) is the story of the close relationship between a 15-year-old boy and the eponymous horse, but it’s hardly a heart-warming tale – well-shot and well-acted, but possibly too sad to bear.  Again the natural rapport between director and teen actor is crucial to the film’s success, in this case Andrew Haigh (45 Years) and Charlie Plummer.  The boy follows his ne’er-do-well father from job to job around the Northwest (WY to WA to OR), but finds a connection when they move close to a race track and he starts to work for a shady trainer played by Steve Buscemi, with Chloe Sevigny as a sympathetic but wised-up jockey.  But the boy’s supports are removed one by one, till he finds himself alone in the desert with his beloved horse, hoping to reach an oasis of care.  The film becomes a grim picaresque of a desolate landscape, both natural and social, marked by flashes of beauty and empathy, as well as calamity.  Harsh as it is, this film has heart.

P.S.  Now I have to add another superb film that falls under this rubric.  Leave No Trace (MC-88, NFX) is writer-director Debra Granik’s follow-up to Winter’s Bone, and is likely to launch the career of magnetic teen actress Thomasin Mackenzie, much as the earlier film did for Jennifer Lawrence.  I don’t remember anyone who could do so much with the quiver of her chin, and check out her native New Zealand accent in interviews.  She most believably plays the young teen daughter of the always-compelling Ben Foster, a war vet with PTSD, who has turned survivalist in the most basic sense.  The two of them live in a park near Portland OR, not just off the grid but way beyond it.  Foraging outdoors all day, and sleeping together in a small tent, they share a bond that is not at all creepy, but none the less disturbing.  Park rangers and child services intervene and set them up in a house on a horse and Christmas tree farm.  Too much civilization for the dad, so they head out for the territory, for (mis)adventures that are deep and scary, but not horrific.  While the father is determined to leave no trace, the daughter is at an age when she begins to want to make a mark on the world, and vice versa.  Her interactions with other people and animals are poignant with longing for connection, though her love for her father is pure and persistent.  We suffer with her in the push and pull of emotions.  And we rejoice in the maturity of her choices.  Lovely and thought-provoking.