About the movie
The Boys Are Back
Rating: 
Cast:
Erik Thomson; George MacKay; Nicholas McAnulty; Emma Lung; Natasha Little; Emma Booth; Clive Owen; Tommy Bastow; Adam Morgan; Laura Fraser
Directed by:
Scott Hicks
On the web:
READER FEEDBACK
‘Boys’ is yet another solid Aussie entry
The Australian film industry's biggest asset seems to be its inexhaustible supply of adorable children.
A few years ago, "Rabbit-proof Fence" won on Oscar nomination on the strength of its young Aboriginal stars. Last year, little Brandon Walters stole "Australia" from Nicole Kidman (petty theft), and this year it's a little lad named Nicholas McAnulty in "The Boys Are Back," breaking hearts as a wee boy who loses his mum to cancer and grows up under the lax supervision of a grieving dad.
When his wife dies, Joe Warr (Clive Owen) decides to go on instinct, and senses that his son Artie (McAnulty) will thrive without structure - the movie opens with a scene of Joe speeding along a sandy beach as Artie sits dangerously on the hood of the Land Rover, his hair blowing and his arms stretched wide.
It's a little "Terms of Endearment," and "The Boys Are Back" has a bit of a weakness for the slick visual gesture, something director Scott Hicks has wrestled with since unleashing Geoffrey Rush on the world in "Shine" some 10 years ago.
For the most part, though, "Boys" is a restrained and surprisingly genuine-feeling work from Hicks, who gets the impassively handsome Owen to contribute one of his more expressive performances.
Keeping the movie subdued isn't easy - the screenplay has Warr getting matter-of-fact visits from the ghost of his dead wife, a device that Hicks manages to integrate without upsetting the tone.
In fact, the pop-up ghosts and freewheeling narrative give the movie a strangely authentic feel. It has the unpredictability of life, and is drawn, as it happens, from a 2001 memoir by journalist Simon Carr.
Warr has a flirtation with a pretty single mom whom he sort of exploits for free day care, a contentious relationship with his mother-in-law (is that redundant?), and much stress at the newspaper where he works and where his editor is rapidly running out of sympathy for lapses brought about by the demands of being a single parent.
On top of everything, Warr is suddenly host to an older boy (George MacKay) by a previous marriage, and suddenly the movie is complicated by an entirely new range of emotional conflict.
The movie is said to be true to the memoir, and maybe it is, but its credibility is nearly undone by an event in the late going that will seem unacceptably ridiculous to any newspaper journalist in the audience.
Of course, the danger of "Boys" running into many of those is slim.
