Dream Boy (2008)

The direction was exquisite in portraying the allure of the initial phases of attraction. With the skillful editing and the above-average to beautiful cinematography, the movie had a well-paced, rich, atmospheric delivery. The director, James Bolton, handled the actors deftly. Bolton carefully spent enough time on the characters to let us know the possible layers of meaning of the way they gaze at each other. The two leads were quite effective. Stephen Bender especially provided an intriguing aura to the character. Diana Scarwid and Thomas Jay Ryan were remarkable in their few scenes. Even Randy Wayne, Owen Beckman, and Rooney Mara delivered.The soundtrack was good but had mixed applications. At the music's best, it delivered subtle meaningful tonal contrasts. At its worst, it was obtrusive and distracting.I haven't read the book, so I'm judging the screenplay on its own. A gay growing-up story has been told over and over again ad nauseam. This movie had all the clichés. What was interesting was the surreal shift with the potential for multilayered interpretations. Not everyone will like this. Personally, this makes me want to read the book. I was satisfied enough with the delivery of this aspect, but I agree it could have been better. The ending was a unique and thought-provoking way of escaping gay media triteness.

I was thoroughly enjoying this film, with its talented and attractive two leads, the evocative setting, and a decently realistic premise.Then came the final act.What happens in the ending is both poorly written and a waste of a potentially fantastic film. In a story that felt so natural and real, the entire third act comes seemingly out of nowhere in effort to force the characters into a specific type of ending. An ending which, though I would have preferred otherwise, could have been achieved much more organically with story pieces already in place (the father) instead of driving an underdeveloped secondary character into an unjustifiable decision, and forcing a main character to passively accept their fate with no fight.Awful. Truly awful.

I'm a gay man so I can speak with some credibility about the portrayal of the main characters in this film. There is no chemistry portrayed here and although the leads are cute and the situations realistic, for the most part (teenagers take every moment for personal connections no matter how inappropriate or imprudent they may be) we are left with a coming-of-age story that while sweet and tender against all apparent odds is betrayed by a thin-as-paper, muddled plot that is formulaic and unsatisfying. The adults are cardboard and the parallelism with "Brokeback Mountain", hyped on the cover, are obvious and contrived. Nowhere do we get the deeply religious/conservative milieu of the 70's Deep South in which the primal and quite beautiful emotional drive of these two boys is cast, beyond episodic church scenes with flatulent pastoral murmurings. So much could've been made of the story but it's a wasted effort I'm afraid.

The South and cinema, ah! Will there ever be a true collaboration between the two? It certainly is sure that something that has to do with the Gothic element, or stern, colorful zealotry, will remain impossible to sublimate into images. Anyway, I prefer Flannery O'Connor, when it comes to such matters.But that is enough proemium. Let's turn now to the true matter: would Flannery O'Connor prefer this film? Just kiddin'.I read some of the other comments. What stroke me was the elaborate analysis on psychoanalytic terms of passivity and aggression and what you will happening somewhere at the film. And I admit right away that I am of the psychoanalytic, especially lacanian persuasion. I would call that my true persuasion. The problem with this, though, is that it will never, never tell you if a film is good or bad, because it is an analytic discourse that avoids evaluations. For evaluations and appreciations I turn elsewhere, say Oscar Wilde, or Harold Bloom.And, dear me, have they told me this film is bad. It is, like the french say of hell, paved with good intentions. And it fails miserably on almost every level. There is no chemistry between the boys (watch how they always fail to engage their kisses, but when Roy kisses - and just once - the girl, the straight element of the actor, to put it that way, seeps through). There is no plausibility in genre-shifting: from maybe adolescent love story, coming out story, perhaps parental abuse story or even maybe religious bashing story coming and brainstorming us early on the film we pass to awkward sexual discovery lamely interconnected with sexual harassment from parent story and at the third act a gruesome, dismaying horror/fantasy element thrown in and allegedly remains unresolved. Ha! When all such stories need a proper mood for anything in them to happen, and when we have in the film no mood at all, just amateurish, half-engaged and ill-conceived stabs at it, tell me where you think it will head to.Too bad, because it has Maximillian Roeg in it, who has something of his mother's, Theresa Russell, off-kilter beauty. But the boy is obviously inexperienced, and the lack of suggestive or guiding direction wasted his presence.Once more, to share Oscar Wilde's splendid aphorism: All bad poetry is sincere.A quite sincere film...