The creators of the
sentimental coming-of-age film Son Of Rambow can go ahead and make
that check out to Wes Anderson, care of Rushmore Academy, with a portion of the
residuals due to Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie) and his signature Rube
Goldberg setpieces. Or at least a producer's credit for Rushmore character Max Fischer,
whose homemade stage productions of Serpico and Heaven And Earth have a child-like visual
stamp that carries over into Rambow's grade-school take on Sylvester Stallone's famed
vigilante. Director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith—the team
better known as "Hammer & Tongs"—made a name for themselves in music
videos, but much like their uneven adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide To
The Galaxy,
the film works better in sequences than as a whole, and suffers from an overly
familiar homemade aesthetic.
Son Of Rambow centers on the tentative
friendship between two outcast kids in early-'80s England. As part of a strict,
fundamentalist "Plymouth Brethren" family, Bill Milner is protected from the
corrupting influence of movies, TV shows, and music, so he channels his
imagination into little sketches and doodles. For a weakling like him, school
bully Will Poulter seems like a natural enemy, but Poulter loves making movies
with his video camera, and the two find some creative common ground. When
Poulter exposes Milner to a videotaped copy of First Blood—the inspiration for
his latest production—the less-experienced boy is overwhelmed by what he
sees and quickly agrees to be Poulter's stuntman and chief collaborator. Their
relationship changes, however, when a French foreign-exchange student (Jules
Sitruk) arrives at school, placing a transfixing, Pied Piper-like hold on
everyone he meets.
The shooting of the
movie-within-a-movie offers the brightest moments in Son Of Rambow, a testament to the
innocence of the boys' creative impulse and the sheer unlikely pleasure of
their friendship. Whether they're pulling off some complicated stunt or
improvising their way around Milner's family, they have to invent solutions on
the fly, and Jennings celebrates their spontaneity and resourcefulness. But the
film goes soft in its second half, as whimsy gives way to out-and-out
sentimentality, and the world around these boys—the too-cute
French-student subplot, the cardboard-thin portraits of their
families—reveals little more depth than the one in their thumb-sucking
Stallone movie. Along with Rushmore's precocious amateurism, Jennings and company
might have done well to borrow some subtext, too.