At 10 years of age, a child the
papers called "Boy A" was thrown into juvenile prison for murdering a
classmate. Released at age 24, Boy A takes a new name and a new identity, and
tries to integrate himself into a society he now finds unfamiliar. He's had no
practice at hanging out with the boys at clubs or asking girls out on dates,
and when one of his co-workers drops a reference to The Office, the joke sails over his head. As
played by Andrew Garfield, Boy A is a gentlemanly sort—albeit in a
forced, petrified way—and whatever bad deeds he's done in the past, he's
ready to be shut of them. If only the rest of the world would let him.
John Crowley's Boy A—adapted by screenwriter Mark
O'Rowe from John Trigell's novel—contemplates questions of sin and
redemption, and whether a person can start fresh after spending more than half
of his life locked away. Much about the story is overheated—including a
wasted detour to examine the relationship between Garfield's caseworker (Peter
Mullan) and his troubled teenage son—and its climax hinges implausibly on
the uniformly hostile reaction when people learn what Garfield did. But
plausibility isn't really Boy A's alpha and omega. The reasons behind Garfield's
disconnection from the world matter much less than how he reacts going forward.
Boy A is at its best when Crowley and
company show the adult Garfield as a product of social engineering—the
scrubbed-clean "new man"—unsure how to behave if, say, his new friends
drop an Ecstasy tablet in his mouth, or involve him in a fight. In his mind,
Garfield is still obsessively reliving the events that led to his incarceration
at 10, and at 24, he's terrified of making the same missteps. No matter how
straight he acts, though, he can only hide his secret for so long. For all
Crowley's reliance on quiet naturalism, Boy A ultimately steals a page from film
noir, showing how guilt and constant hounding can turn any ex-con into the
desperate animal everyone presumes him to be.