Anyway, L.I.E. is an excellent movie, regardless of the setting in which I saw it. By turns funny, heart-wrenching, and occasionally repellent, it's gotten a lot of press for featuring a pedophile, but it's ultimately a moving story about a lost boy. Howie (Paul Franklin Dano) is a sensitive suburban kid whose mother has recently died in a car crash on the L.I.E. (Long Island Expressway) and whose building-contractor father is in deep legal trouble. With no real home life, Howie spends his time with a small pack of bad influences, who lead him into breaking into houses. One such house turns out to belong to Big John (Brian Cox), who likes young boys in a way he shouldn't. Big John tracks down Howie and demands his stuff back; when Howie can't comply, Big John wants some other kind of "payment."
Cox is excellent in a role that varies from creepy to pathetic. Really, every performance excels. Dano is marvelous; he literally brought tears to my eyes a couple of times (he writes a poem about his late mother that ends with lines that went something like: "I know that never again will someone check if I have a fever by touching my forehead with their lips," which just got me bawling).
More than anything, L.I.E. feels true. It's intimate, humanly scaled, and completely without artifice. Don't worry, it broaches the pedophilia thing carefully, and only a few minutes of the whole movie made me uncomfortable. When I mentioned that it was funny, a friend asked me if it was sick humor; I said no... but then I realized that one of the running jokes during the movie is that one kid is sleeping with his sister, and I guess most people would file incest humor under "sick humor," so maybe yes in that sense.
It's astonishing that this is the first movie for both the writer (Stephen Ryder) and the director (Michael Cuesta). Literally, I laughed, I cried. I'd put it on my "best of year" list so far, and I highly recommend it.
Audience rant: As much rude and moronic behavior as I've seen at the movies, this one tops them all. About 20 minutes before the movie ended, a woman wandered into the theater with two small children (bear in mind that L.I.E. is rated NC-17) and marched them up to nearly the top row, all the while all of them talking in loud voices. They move around the rows several times, discussing seating arrangements, and finally get settled, whereupon they then discuss who gets which snack. They keep up a steady stream of chatter, despite being shushed frequently, and eventually, about the third or fourth time since she came in that a character in the movie says, "Fuck," the mother starts to clue in that maybe she's not in the right theater. So she goes to check if they're in the right place and leaves the children alone in the theater. Meanwhile, on the screen, there's a dude getting shot, there's a scene in a jail, there's cursing, there's a guy cruising for young boys.... I came this close to escorting the children out of the theater myself. Finally, the mother returns. She stands at the bottom of the stairs and hollers up to her kids that they're supposed to be in Theater 2, which is downstairs (we are in Theater 11, upstairs). She keeps yelling at them as they carefully pick their way down the dark stairs, but she gets angry at their slowness and storms out of the theater. In trying to run after her, the kids trip and spill their popcorn and drinks all over the place. Needless to say, neither mother nor spawn returned to clean it up.
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