DIRECTORS
Chris
Weitz
Paul Weitz
SCREENWRITERS
Peter
Hedges
Chris Weitz
Paul Weitz
based
on the book by
Nick
Hornby
PRODUCERS
Tim Bevan
Robert De Niro
Brad Epstein
Eric Fellner
Jane Rosenthal
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Remi Adefarasin
MUSIC
Badly Drawn Boy
EDITORS
Nick Moore
CAST
Hugh Grant (Will Freeman)
Toni Collette (Fiona)
Rachel Weisz (Rachel)
Nicholas Hoult (Marcus)
Nat Gastiain Tena (Ellie)
Augustus Prew (Ali)
Isabel Brook (Angie)
Sharon Small (Christine)
Victoria Smurfit (Suzie)
MPAA rating: PG-13
Running
time: 100m
U.S. release: May 17, 2002
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
Other Weitz
Bros. films
reviewed on this website:
- American
Pie
See also:
- High
Fidelity
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Nick Hornby's novel About
a Boy is really about two boys: Marcus (Nicholas Hoult),
a long-suffering and ridiculed 12-year-old weathering the instabilities
of his depressive divorced mom Fiona (Toni Collette), and Will
(Hugh Grant), a well-to-do 38-year-old loafer who grudgingly
takes Marcus under his wing. Living comfortably off the royalties
of a novelty Christmas song ("Santa's Super Sleigh,"
perhaps Hornby's nod to Melvin and Howard) written by
his dad, Will isn't quite proud of the fact that he does "nothing"
(his stock answer when asked what he does), though he is proud
that he's closing in on 40 without having gotten dragged into
anything messy or emotional -- anything meaningful, in
other words.
Hornby specializes in overgrown
boys surrounding themselves with cocoons of comforting, life-blocking
stuff. In High
Fidelity, adapted into a John Cusack vehicle two years
ago, it was records and music trivia; here it's the empty, flashy
detritus of a solitary rich man's flat. Both stories are also
inextricably linked to music; the novel unfolds during 1993 and
1994, when Kurt Cobain nearly killed himself and then succeeded,
and is named after the Nirvana song "About a Girl."
(Hornby, who occasionally writes music reviews for The New
Yorker, obviously has pop on the brain.) And both stories
are about how the overgrown boys are forced to mature.
Will stumbles into the position
of Marcus's adult friend (certainly Will considers himself in
no way a father or even big brother) during a particularly
dodgy period when he's attending a single-parent support group,
pretending to have a never-seen son named Ned, in order to meet
and date single mothers. While dating Suzie (Victoria Smurfit),
a friend of Fiona's, Will meets Marcus on a support-group picnic.
Before long, Will is drawn quite against his will ("against
my better judgment," he might put it) into the problems
of the miserable Marcus and his equally despondent mum. Who needs
the hassle? Surely Will doesn't. Yet Marcus does fill
a need Will hadn't even known was there -- he gives Will a purpose,
a reason to get up in the morning other than himself. Slowly,
and bitching all the way, Will begins to help Marcus, and realizes
that Marcus is the one helping him.
If the role of Will wasn't
written for Hugh Grant, it may as well have been. For perhaps
the first time, Grant is allowed to headline a movie in which
he isn't a variation on the amiably stammering Englishman he
played in Four Weddings and a Funeral. He dined out on
that for years, even though he'd played different kinds of parts
before that, and his supporting role as a womanizing cad in last
year's Bridget
Jones's Diary may have been a dry run for Will,
a decent enough fellow whom one character accurately describes
as "blank." Well, it's not that he's blank, really
-- he knows there's something missing, he's just too comfortable
on the couch to go out in the chaos of life and relationships
to look for it. Grant plays him as a man in transition, with
potential that could point to triumph or disaster, and manages
to paint shades of both hope and fear into the performance.
Marcus (a fine, uncutesy job
by newcomer Hoult) needs a father figure, or at least, as he
puts it, "back-up." Fiona loves him as much as she's
able, but her unpredictable bouts with depression scare him,
particularly when one of them almost results in her going the
way of Kurt Cobain. Sadly, the script -- by directors Chris and
Paul Weitz of American
Pie, along with Peter Hedges of What's Eating Gilbert
Grape -- drops all the book's Nirvana/Cobain references,
perhaps because the filmmakers were denied the rights to use
Nirvana's music or Cobain's image. Happily, the movie, following
Hornby's lead, doesn't do anything so clichéd as having
Will and Fiona fall in love. Instead, Will falls for Rachel (Rachel
Weisz), a children's book illustrator who assumes that Marcus
is Will's son, an assumption Will does little to dissuade.
I could've done without the
"Killing Me Softly" finale (though it's amusing to
watch Hugh Grant rocking out to Roberta Flack on guitar), and
the movie's loss of the Kurt Cobain backdrop also reduces one
of the novel's more interesting characters -- Ellie (Nat Gastiain
Tena), a punkish older girl who takes a liking to Marcus. In
the book, it's Nirvana that unites them; here nothing much seems
to bind them together, and she's only in a handful of scenes.
About a Boy is more successful as a Hugh Grant vehicle
than as a Nick Hornby adaptation. It should reanimate Grant's
career as a leading man, though, and it should establish the
Weitz brothers as filmmakers who can do more than teen lust and
pastry intimacy.
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