From Internet Movie Database 18 July 2000
Ambitious short.
Author: Darragh O' Donoghue (hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from Dublin,
Ireland
This strange short fluctuates in tone from soft-focus fantasy to
deadpan comedy to a sombre treatment of death. This trajectory might
mirror the moral progress of the hero, 18-year-old birthday boy Chris,
an averagely selfish teenager, who comes to an awareness that there are
other realities outside of his own. For a film set by the sea, it is
very claustrophobic, as we move from the inside of someone's head to a
messy teenage bedroom to a gloomy death bed; this sense of suffocation
and entrapment is appropriate to lives standing stock still, allowing
the detritus of life to litter up around them, swallowing them up.
The film's narrative focus shifts abruptly from the melancholy dreams
of Dad to the unusual dilemma of his son. It's unusual in our
youth-saturated culture to have a film which sympathises with a
parental figure, but Dad is almost zombi-like as he stares into space,
dreaming, crushed, disappointed, sad. The scene where he slowly,
unansweringly replaces the receiver blaring with an irate ex-wife,
explains everything - he is the kind of paralysingly passive person who
can do nothing to change his life, and only alienates others to fury.
His son plays guitar, is casually destructive and always sponging. On
3.33 a.m., the exact time of his 18th birthday, he awaits the expected
special gift, and is presented with a bill for a quarter of a million
dollars for upkeep, allowances, presents etc. Dad throws him out and
won't see him again until Chris has bought his dream boat.
This might seem a monstrous abrogation of parental responsibility, but
we feel a great deal of amused sympathy for this pained, neglected man,
and his action does have, unwittingly, the desired effect. It is clear
that he is close to break down, and it is painful to watch his speedy
decline as the only thing left for him, his son, disappears.
In an effort to raise funds, Chris answers a newspaper notice
advertising for sons. In a rundown shack which seems to boast Gothic
interiors he finds a dying woman who has somehow let down her own son,
and promises boys of his age a bequest for company. When Chris arrives,
his predecessor runs fleeing from the house, making us fear the worst;
but Ms. Crabb's understandable grouchiness and insults soon give way to
the pains of remorse, and the more physical rattles of death. As if to
alert us, she reads a book on Rembrandt, and this section is shot in a
brooding darkness autumnally lit as in that master's paintings, an
eerie combination of death and an ungraspable spirituality.
It's rare to see a short tackle so many themes - parents and children;
coming of age; mid-life crisis; death; dreams and reality etc. The
character triangle of reconciled men and dying woman might seem
misogynistic, but the very lack of female input seems to account for
the sterility of the men's lives, if only to clean up their mess.
