Mysterious Skin (2004)

OMG what a disturbing film about child abuse and its after-effects.  This was a terrific film in that sense; it made me laugh in a couple of place (it has a fairly good sense of humour) - only to make me feel incredibly uncomfortable as the full significance of what was going on became unfolded. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is fantastic here and shows real skill in conveying the character - a rent boy on a path of self-destruction.  That character may be a cliche but the film carries it off quite well.  Strangely the acting skills of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which are wildly apparent here, did not translate so well in Christopher Nolan's recent offerring Inception (2010), a much hailed but I think deeply flawed film (but I digress)...

The film got you to feel for the characters.  I found myself wanting to shout at Neil (Gordon-Levitt) as he got himself in risky situations - such as going home with people who were very clearly undesirables.  How could he be so stupid!?!  I rarely shout out in the middle of a film, so that is really something.  And the UFO abduction narrative relayed by Neil's co-abused Brian (Brady Cobert) created a real sense of pathos; the aliens, as in Louis Nowra's play Summer of the Aliens - are in fact the abusers, the adults that corrupt the lives of the innocents.  The ew factor is high.  And that ew factor is exacerbated by the fact that child abuse is apparently alot more common than we think....

While I think this is a terrific film, I did wonder about certain aspects of the narrative and how 'realistic' they were.  I can't speak with authority here, but I wonder (for example) about the representation of the activities of the hustler Neil.  In his home hicktown (whose name escapes me), an indeed in NYC, it was as if he would spend alot of his time getting sucked off by others (usually ugly fat middle-aged old men) - and get paid.  I would have thought that it'd be more likely to be the other way around - he would have to be servicing them.

The abuser, the coach, was not the typical looking pedo that we see in the press.  Instead of a dirty old man type, he was actually quite, well, handsome, sporting a vaguely Magnum PI-cum-Village People mustache.  Indeed, Neil has a crush on him as soon as he sees him.  Ok, I can accept that perhaps not all pedos are ugly just as not all are ex-catholic priests etc.  But then the details of the abuse emerged: coach would suck them off (despite the fact that they did not look old enough to be 'capable') and then, err, he get them to fist him....! Ewww.  Is that typical pedo abuse?  Somehow, I thought the abuse would more likely be rape: the kids would get penetrated.  My point is that I found this rather odd - but maybe this is an expression of my ignorance of pedofilia more than anything else.  Alternatively it might have something to do with production decisions in the light of film censorship.  It would be interesting to read Scott Heim's novel, on which the film was based, to see if that may have been the case.

Anyway, the bottom line is that Mysterious Skin is a powerful, disturbing experience.  **** stars from me.

A nice commentary appears here: http://fourfour.typepad.com/fourfour/2006/03/skin_flick_1.html
The novelists blog: http://heim.etherweave.com/weblog/index.html