BOY A is a good reminder of just how difficult it can be to translate theme and narrative from novel to screen. Directed by John Crowley, this film nearly gets everything so right that it is an absolute shock when the film flies off the tracks in the last act.
Andrew Garfield plays a young ex-con with a secret in his past. This secret is so dark that he is forced to change his identity during the film's opening sequence. He chooses the name Jack. Case worker Terry (Peter Mullan) coaches him through the transition with sensitivity and patience. During this sequence, completely unaware of what I was about to see, the film La Femme Nikita came to mind. What was Jack in for? Would he become entangled with the governement? With the police? BOY A peels back the onion slowly and you really do not know what is going to happen. Through the use of soft, desaturated images, tight close ups and low angles a feeling of unease is gradually built and as Jack begins his transition we slip in and out of flashbacks and the narrative thread is off and running.
Every scene is so visually assured and so well acted that you begin to give your trust over to the filmmakers completely. The story is populated with interesting working class British characters. All of them seem honorable in a way. There is a wounded nature to working class characters. They bond to one another. It is not that unlikely in such stories that a person might be asked to forgive a friend's (or a lover's) past transgressions in service of creating a bond in the present.
At the center of this story is Andrew Garfield's performance, which is charming and dead on believable. It is difficult to take your eyes off of him, so fully does he create his own interior world as an actor. Everyone else is teriffic too. Everyone. The camera work is unusual, keeping you off balance with unconventional angles. The intercutting from present to past works well. Everything is great. And then comes the final act.
Jack's secret is revealed rather abruptly by a secondary character (one who is not very well developed). There is little suspense or intrigue in how it happens. It just happens. The set up for this is bungled as we don't feel enough for the secondary character who snitches. At this point, the story has been so skewed toward Jack's current relationships, state of mind and memories of the past that the revelations and plot twists come off feeling stale and obvious. In fact we see everything coming from a mile away. And all of our wonderful characters disappear from the story. There is no meaningful interplay between them as Jack's world falls apart. He simply clutches his head and sinks into a corner, as does the film. It feels like a coward's ending to a great story that might have been.
Everything that comes before the last act is of the highest caliber. Everything that occurs in the last act feels overly arty, overly cutty, and uninterestingly morose. Suddenly we find ourselves in a freshman film school project. What a shame.
It is said that first impressions are everything. But in the movies, nothing leaves an audience with a bad taste like a botched ending. It is just so sad to think about what a great film BOY A almost was.