I love movies. Well, not The Black Balloon. I thought it
sucked. But in general.
Still, I think there are a lot of people who would enjoy The
Black Balloon. In fact, more than 1,400 voters on the Internet
Movie Database have given it an average rating of 7.5 out of 10. Now,
there are a lot of stupid people in the world, but still, and I mean
this sincerely, 7.5 out of 10 is above average. Totally above
average.
The Black Balloon is about a few weeks in the life of
teenager Thomas Mollison and his family. Since they’re Australian, Mrs.
Mollison is played by Toni Collette, about whom nobody has anything bad
to say ever, because she’s an impeccable actress. If she was pretty,
she’d have Angelina Jolie money. As it stands, she has to live on the
praise of critics.
Anyway, Mrs. Mollison and her husband, Simon, move around a lot,
because he’s in the army (or as they say in Australia, “the ahmy”).
Which is hard on their son Thomas (Rhys Wakefield), who, at 15, is
experiencing pubic-hair feelings for the first time. Also difficult is
the fact that Thomas’ brother, Charlie (Luke Ford), has severe autism,
can’t speak, runs around the neighborhood in his underwear urinating in
strangers’ bathrooms, and occasionally creates art with his own
feces.
When the family moves to a new town, Thomas decides to make friends
by going to lifeguard school. There, he encounters Jackie (Gemma Ward),
who is causing all the boys’ bathing suits to look like they’ve been
used as storage bags by large-mushroom collectors. Thus, Thomas’
underpants-tingling leads him to seek fleshly knowledge of Jackie’s
recessed areas.
Of course, Charlie causes trouble for Thomas’ hormonal happiness by
being autistic and breaking into Jackie’s house and running into the
bathroom while she’s in the shower. But Jackie—and this is the
second thing I hated about this movie (the first was
“everything”)—is one of those magical movie teenage girls who,
while having no particular story or complexity, is nonetheless
wonderful and sprinkles magic and sunshine on the deserving boy who
loves her. What makes this doubly annoying is that her attraction to
Thomas is largely unexplained; it’s just that he’s the protagonist of
the film, so of course the most attractive female in the cast is in
love with him.
Anyway, they bond, and she’s nice to Charlie and understanding of
the troubles Thomas has and blah blah blah. The problem up to this
point in the film is that nothing interesting happens. It’s all
scene-setting: Here’s supermom Toni Collette taking care of things and
refusing to rest while pregnant, even though the doctors order her to.
Here’s Thomas, made sensitive by his autistic brother and his family’s
constant migrations. Here’s Charlie, the lovable but troublesome
autistic child. And here’s Jackie, the magic girlfriend. Everything
moves right along like this for the first half of the film.
Then there’s some tender love and swimming and, I swear to God, a
montage of Thomas and Jackie and Charlie running through the woods and
crawling through an obstacle course of pipes and ropes and laughing and
smiling and playing with sticks while a perky alterna-pop song plays.
It’s completely but unselfconsciously parodic. Then, tragically,
there’s some truly horrible dialogue, because all of the sudden, the
writers (Elissa Down, who also directed, and Jimmy Jack) realize they
have to give Jackie a backstory, so they have her close her eyes and
tell Thomas to close his eyes, and she says, “What do you see?” and he
says, “Fuzzy spots,” and she says, “Those never go away. … I keep
thinking that if I stare at them long enough, they’ll go away, and I’ll
see my mother.” Because her mom is dead. So, you know, that makes her a
good person.
And then there’s some violence and conflict in the Mollison
household, which is actually kind of nice, because finally
something happens in the movie. It’s like director Down spent an
hour trying to decide what the movie was about, and then, having failed
to figure that out, just threw in a fight. But it’s a well-done fight,
and the movie finally kicks into gear, and the last half hour is pretty
decent.
So if you’re still in the theater at that point, there’s something.
I will say that technically, the film is excellent in several ways.
First, the cinematography by Denson Baker is completely invisible.
Baker knows exactly where to place a camera so that it feels like
you’re not watching a movie; there’s just a story unfolding in your
mind. His skill at lighting is also impressive. Much of it is natural
light, which doesn’t make things easier, and the indoor scenes have a
richly colored naturalness to them.
Plus, Collette and Erik Thomson (as Thomas’ father) are great in
their roles, again putting forward exactly the kind of unforced
naturalness that an intimate film like this calls for. Gemma Ward is
also surprisingly good, especially considering that she’s mostly a
fashion model and has only done three films.
So, in closing, there are some nice things that I’ve said about
The Black Balloon. I mean, it’s sappy and cute and
formulaic, and people enjoy that. Who am I to stop them?
This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2009.
what I am going to write about here is probably irrelavant with the film reviewed here, but I just have a riddle that has been around in my mind these days. I re-read some of Shakespear works and I do not know why Shakespere, but if Coriolanus could have been outlived regardless of his virtue, that is hubris, then main characters in the succeeding stories after Coriolanus ride out the Ulysses-ish journey, then Antonio spares his insanity by penance:what is waiting for Prospero? He himself says it is desperation but if he had written another strory after that, that would have been something like Love’s labor’s lost
or as you like it:similar kind of formulaic story about love, or Prospero would have found something different? I finished re-reading Tempest but I just cannot come up with any book to read.
correction
Antonio escapes from insanity
soliloquy: I was listening to Glen Gould playing concerto, then I remembered Soseki Natsume’s three cornered world was a Gould’s favorite book. Before reading, the name of Cezanne came up, and after reading the book, I wonder how his painting would be like if he would have lived today. Prospero would be in despair after the spell is gone but in desparation when still in confinement. I misunderstood. How the spell can be broken–I thought I go visit an aquaintance of old regarding space and whom I know from school called Intermedium Institute. I don’t know if intercommunication could break the spell but it seems a sole narrow path I have at hand.