DIRECTOR
Bryan
Singer
SCREENWRITER
Brandon
Boyce
based
on the novella by
Stephen
King
PRODUCERS
Jane Hamsher
Don Murphy
Bryan Singer
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Newton Thomas Sigel
MUSIC
John Ottman
EDITOR
John Ottman
CAST
Ian McKellen (Kurt Dussander)
Brad Renfro (Todd Bowden)
Bruce Davison (Richard Bowden)
Elias Koteas (Archie)
Joe Morton (Dan Richler)
Jan Triska (Isaac Weiskopf)
Michael Byrne (Ben Kramer)
Heather McComb (Becky Trask)
Joshua Jackson (Joey)
James Karen (Victor Bowden)
David Schwimmer (Edward French)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 111m
U.S. release: October 23, 1998
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official website
Other Bryan
Singer films
reviewed on this website:
- The
Usual Suspects
- X-Men
|
Stephen
King's Different Seasons, his 1982 collection of novellas,
has yielded three fine movies: Stand by Me, The Shawshank
Redemption, and now Apt Pupil. (The fourth story,
"The Breathing Method," remains unfilmed -- and probably
unfilmable.) Of the three, Apt Pupil is easily the riskiest
and toughest, both as a story in itself and as a challenge for
filmmakers. At least one set of adapters took a whack at it,
and were only eleven days away from a wrap before the plug was
pulled and the film shelved. Plagued by delays, legal hassles,
and the problems of the material itself, this film has had the
longest, most difficult pregnancy in recent memory.
Fortunately, Apt Pupil has two skillful sets of hands
to deliver it: director Bryan Singer (who made the coolly intricate
puzzle The
Usual Suspects) and first-time screenwriter Brandon Boyce,
a Singer associate who acted in Singer's 1992 debut Public
Access. It also has a master to cut the cord from King's
book and slap it into its own chilling life: Ian McKellen as
Kurt Dussander, the Blood Fiend of Patin, a Nazi war criminal
hiding in the peaceful, leafy suburbs. Apt Pupil would
be well-crafted without McKellen; with him, it's haunting --
a true horror movie.
Dussander, posing as "Arthur Denker," is visited one
day by Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro), a straight-A student with an
unnatural interest in the Holocaust. He recognizes Dussander
from old photographs, and he strikes a deal with the old man:
Todd will keep quiet if Dussander will regale Todd with stories
of what really happened in the death camps -- all the gory details
they leave out in school. At first disgusted, Dussander soon
warms to his storyteller role, reliving (in more ways than one)
his unspeakable past. And we watch as his influence rubs off
on Todd.
Stephen King's novella is perhaps unique among his work in that
it's genuinely evil. I don't mean that as a criticism but as
a sort of compliment: King went further than he'd ever gone (and
has ever gone since), climbing into the heads of his old and
young monsters, and he took us with him, at length -- an ugly
and undeniably compelling experience that makes us question ourselves:
If we're ready to condemn Todd for hanging on Dussander's every
word, what does that make us for reading it? The novella is bizarre
and mechanistic and compulsively readable -- maybe the closest
King has come to his version of art.
Unfortunately, toward the end of his story, King took a sharp
left turn into pulp. Singer and Boyce have wisely altered the
ending, making it much more subtle, and have also muted some
of the novella's gorier bits. What remains is still challenging.
We see that Dussander is a monster and that Todd is becoming
one, yet the basic conventions of narrative force us into complicity
with them -- force us to hope they don't get caught. When the
two put one over on Todd's dweeby guidance counselor (David Schwimmer,
whose milquetoast persona works for the first time in a movie),
we're meant to enjoy their deception -- and we do.
Brad Renfro is decent as Todd, though he differs sharply from
King's Todd (who started out as a cheerful Boy Scout type). We
don't perceive much of a change in his personality -- he's unsmiling
and withdrawn right from the start. Somebody like the amiable,
funny Seth Green might have truly frightened us by changing from
a nice kid into a beast. Still, Renfro holds his own up there
with Ian McKellen, who gives one of the year's great performances.
McKellen plays Dussander as a withered husk who comes to life
when reminded of the butcher he once was. He makes Dussander
human, and therefore all the more monstrous. Apt Pupil
can't go as far or as deep as King did; fiction writers have
pages and pages to depict their characters' inner workings, but
a movie, at a certain point, has to stop and hope it has an actor
strong enough to fill in the blanks. This movie does. |
