Duncan Mudge is the town joke. 14 years old, he rides around on his bike, running errands with his familiar, a white hen he calls “chicken.” Half the time he seems to be in a trance, the other half he lacks the judgment to keep his more peculiar thoughts to himself. His mother has died suddenly and Duncan has shifted into the realm where terrible loss either blinds us to the appropriate world or pushes us past caring. He has a kind of accidental, naive nobility. Duncan (The Mudge Boy) needs what he needs and never pretends otherwise. He doesn’t even know it’s not okay to ask. And writer/director Michael Burke doesn’t make him a quaint human rabbit, like say, Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man or Chance the Gardener in Being There.
Emile Hirsch jumps into the role with both feet and there are times when he positively seems to have flown in from Planet Neptune. Hirsch’s performance becomes all the more impressive as Duncan begins to grow on us, despite his eccentricities. Obviously he and his father, Edgar (Richard Jenkins) miss the mother intensely, but while Edgar takes to burning all her belongings, Duncan sleeps in her fur coat, speaks for her at the supper table and imitates her skill of calming a chicken by putting its’ head in his mouth. Needless to say, there are gender issues at work behind this imagery.
If you can get past the bizarre conceit that informs The Mudge Boy, it is more than worth your while to do so. The hen that Duncan carries with him is actually a very complex metaphor that works on several levels. Whether male or female chickens peck. Chickens probably remind Duncan of his mother. Chickens are nurturing. Chickens live in a passive world of their own. Chickens are synonymous with cowardice. And so on. It takes a while for the various components of the film to kick in and come together, but when they do, the effect is brutal, unsettling and inconsolably sad. It never explains its idiosyncratic devices, it never resorts to shorthand, but like the best poetry or painting it often brings the grotesque, menacing world into sharp focus.
Men dominate the film, it is their world for the most part, and we are relieved when Perry Foley (Tom Guiry) another teenager, takes Duncan under his wing, protecting him from the other teenage boys that mock him. There’s an ominous sense of dread that suffuses the movie. We keep bracing ourselves for some horrible, ugly act of abuse, and it comes, although ultimately Duncan seems to handle it better than we do. He is more terrified of his father’s reaction and Perry’s, than the toxic behavior he’s been subjected to. Like Dawn Wiener in Welcome to the Dollhouse, he will take any reasonable facsimile of love, whenever and however he can find it.
The rape scene that occurs at the climax of the film was, frankly, horrendous, but not gratuitous. It’s appropriate, I guess, that Perry mistakes conquest for urgency, on the one hand showing concern for Duncan’s welfare, and on the other, slapping him, dressing him in his mother’s wedding gown, calling him “bitch.“ Perhaps there’s some solace in understanding Perry’s inability to reconcile his feelings of tenderness for Duncan and the need that drives his attachment to women. When Duncan finds him a few nights later and asks for a kiss, we realise Duncan’s overwhelming need to connect has blinded him to Perry’s cruelty. And Perry’s response will knock you on your ass. If you’re not already down there.
At it’s core, The Mudge Boy is about the inability of straight men to comfort, nurture and care for one another, even when it’s legitimately, desperately needed. And how they mask their ambivalence with contempt for other men too “weak” to pretend it’s not important. You don’t have to be queer, of course, to understand men (and all human beings) have an infinite capacity to express this tender side, once they get past the roles that culture would foist upon us. At first The Mudge Boy seems careless or nasty or arbitrary, it takes awhile to catch up to it’s wisdom. I’m skeptical of any movie that tries to suggest possible “reasons” for why some of us turn out to be gay (and worse yet, a “cure”) but the end of the film more than compensates, I think, for what may be dubious intent. And putting that issue aside, for the moment, Michael Burke has fashioned an important, disturbing, deeply affecting and ultimately redemptive film on the destructive impact that society has on men and our ability to protect, restore and save one another.