The Big Guy

If George Stevens’ THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD is ever going to gain a reputation as other than a bloated yawn, I think it’ll have to be seen on the big screen. On a medium-sized TV, which is the way I saw it, bits of its aesthetic don’t altogether come off, but I could imagine they might if one were viewing with a proper home cinema type set-up, or in the wonder of Super Panavision 70. In particular, the idea of larding the screen with guest stars, then letting them linger in the background as mere specks, seems counter-intuitive, but enlarge the image and hey presto, or hallelujah if you prefer.

Quick digression — a movie marketing speaker once used Mel Gibson’s sadomasochistic gay snuff film THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST to make a kind of “nobody knows anything” point about selling movies. Who could have predicted that a gruellingly violent, long, subtitled, movie set in ancient times with no real stars would be a monster hit. I felt that the producers must have suspected the thing could make money — they might have simply been indulging Mel in the hopes of milking another LETHAL MAX or MAD WEAPON film out of him, but his project was so eccentric that had it lost money it might have really done an ON DEADLY GROUND level of damage to what we must, I suppose, call his credibility.

The reason the film could be viewed as some kind of commercial possibility was that Gibson’s choices added up to the illusion — and it was merely an illusion, since the dead languages used were incorrect and the levels of violence inflicted on Jim Caviezel would have crippled him long before he could have reached Golgotha — of being present at the crucifixion. And there are many among the faithful who would love to do that. You’d think the sermon on the mount or one of the miracles would be better, more spiritually uplifting than the mere nailing in and tortuous death, but a little thought and you realize that a sermon delivered in ancient Aramaic or whatever, without the aid of subtitles or a Babel fish, would be deathly dull, and miracles are just so hard to believe in. So the slow, bloody execution would have to do.

Seen from this angle, the absence of stars is a positive bonus, since what we’re looking for is a simulacrum of time travel, which would be spoiled if, say, Jack Black popped up as Caiaphas, or Jessica Alba sashayed past as Martha of Bethany. The brutality, apart from exercising a suppressed part of Gibson’s warped libido, can be used to represent the concept of “realism,” and the fact that everybody’s talking foreign, obsolete languages adds to the you-are-there quality — as well as explaining why Gibson would have preferred to have the film shown without even subtitles, to complete the effect of being stranded in another time and place.

(Incidentally, I find the film interesting, not as drama because it’s dull and one-note on that level, nor as a religious text because it eliminates any nuance of philosophy, ethics or theology in favour of, well, antisemitic caricature, but as a piece of psychosexual pathology it’s repulsive but fascinating.)

THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD strives for its own kind of realism, using the cinematic codes of its day, which depended less on violence and more on production values. I’ll let Cecil explain it ~

“This isn’t a fantasy, this is history!” Attention to detail and the lavishing of funds on elaborate sets, costumes, and swarms of extras was the path to creating a believable story world, and George Stevens takes that philosophy to an extreme. And much of what he achieves is remarkable — a montage depicting Jerusalem as a wretched hive of scum and villainy has real grit and misery to it, reminding us of Stevens’ experience as wartime documentarist, present at the liberation of death camps.

“More awe, John!”

The guest stars undercut this quite badly at times — Pat Boone doesn’t really hold any significance for me otherwise his appearance as an angel would be disastrous, but John Wayne’s cameo as a centurion does deserve its place as one of cinema’s greatest ever aesthetic blunders, and even Shelley Winters — lovely, mega-talented Shelley Winters — is problematic, since she pops up for about five seconds, dominates a close shot, and then fleeteth as a shadow. It’s distracting.

Mostly, I have to say, Stevens has cast well, and strong players like Martin Landau (Caiaphus), Jose Ferrer (Herod Antipas), Claude Rains (the other one) and Sal Mineo (Uriah, I think) bring either humanity or at least theatrical tricks to bear on the entertainment. This punctuates the visual splendour, which is at times almost oppressively unrelenting.

Max Von Sideboard and Donald “Satan” Pleasence, under your basic bilious moon.

Max Von Sydow’s Jesus isn’t everybody’s cup of sacramental wine. His slow, unemotional delivery suits the rhythm of the film, but doesn’t help get the thing dancing. One critic said that “when he says at the end, ‘I am with you always, even until the end of time,’ it’s a THREAT.” I wouldn’t go that far — a quick comparison with Teenage Jesus Jeffrey Hunter shows what Max adds — even when he’s boring, he’s sort of interesting. At least interesting to look at. Hunter might be prettier, but pretty can be pretty dull unless enlivened by an inner spark of some kind.

It seems to me that both Max and Jeffrey Hunter are playing JC as some kind of space alien (limbering up for FLASH GORDON and Star Trek, respectively), but maybe it’s just that Michael Rennie gives the same perf as Klaatu in THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL: stoic, patrician, faraway look, private smiles. The same approach adapts easily to playing Abe Lincoln. Doesn’t seem to make any sense, that, but there it is.

Stupendous crane shot which CLEARLY inspired the last frames of THE DEVILS.

The Big Myth about Stevens is that his war experience ruined him as a filmmaker, made him shun the comedy he was so good at, and concentrate on solemn and ponderous message movies that didn’t play to his strengths. I think A PLACE IN THE SUN, for one, indicates that farce’s loss was drama’s gain. I also think that his aesthetic choices got richer after the war — more on that further down.

TGSET is undoubtedly short on humour. A filmmaker approaching the Bible with reverence is obviously going to struggle for laughs. Reverence disintegrates in the face of comedy, and so you can be reasonably sure that any comic relief that makes it into a biblical epic won’t be funny. But Stevens does manage a little wit — Ferrer’s Herod is amusingly tetchy and sarcastic with nearly everybody, and Christ has a conversation with a prospective disciple which makes even him smile –

“What’s your name?”

“Jesus.”

“Jesus. That’s a good name.”

“Thank you.”

Later, when the gang are in hiding and practicing their security measures, there’s a knock at the door –

“Who’s there?”

“It’s me.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say ‘It’s me.’”

“But it was me.”

But that’s about it. Stevens made the best PG Wodehouse adaptation in screen history (A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS) and helmed classic comedy THE MORE THE MERRIER and extremely funny adventure GUNGA DIN, and those are the only moments of humour he includes in a 225 minute epic. Even Charlton Heston and Telly Savalas, as John the Baptist and Pilate respectively, don’t raise many laughs, intentional or otherwise, which is an achievement of sorts. The lack of giggles is disappointing in a man who once photographed Laurel & Hardy shorts. Oliver Hardy was always stepping on nails too, but there the resemblance ends.

Looong pause before credits, tiny font moving glacially up screen — all this is to convince us of the solemnity and import of this movie, and as such it should be redundant if the film is genuinely important. Still, at least it’s an unusual approach to establishing importance. The film has its own odd, distinctive way of moving — very slowly, it is true, but it’s an over-simplification to say they’re just drawing everything out. The rhythms of the action, and the choices of what to show and what to elide, are distinctive and interesting. The movie is slightly more interested in Christ’s moral philosophy than his theology or his politics (Ray’s KING OF KINGS is more interested in opposing him to Barrabas in a pacifist/activist dichotomy). Which is good, because questions about Christ’s divinity, as explored by Scorsese, interest me only in the abstract, since I regard Jesus as a man who maybe had some historical existence, at best. (I’d like to see a movie where Christ is a man impersonating the Messiah in order to do good — but it seems unlikely anybody’s going to make that.)

Ethics and morality (never sure of the difference) is where Christ scores, for me. Gore Vidal points out that the whole “Do unto others” thing was said by Confucius first, but even so, Jesus did well to come up with the same admirable idea, unless God was looking over Kongzi’s shoulder, copying down what he said. The stuff about God (pronounced “Gaadd” if you’re in a biblical epic) doesn’t impress me because I consider God a good bit more fictional than Jesus, but Christ’s pronouncements on how we should behave still strike me as largely sound, leaving out the invisible superbeing stuff. Or keep Him in, if you must — theism or atheism seems to be determined by the set-up of your brain, although the choice of belief is clearly programmed by upbringing (it’s hilarious, all those Christians, Muslims, Jews, thanking the Lord they were lucky enough to be born into the One True Faith: absurd at a glance).

At first, I thought the Utah locations were going to make the movie play like a John Ford western, or Stevens’ own GUNGA DIN. But thanks to Chuckles here, PLANET OF THE APES is prefigured WAY more often.

As delivery mechanisms for Christ’s teachings, Ray’s KOK and Stevens’ TGSET both do OK, surprisingly — there are moments where dramatic performance and visuals actually help the meaning of long-familiar prayers and parables to emerge. Both movies have enough turgidity, however, to make using them in Church perhaps inadvisable — they might work as aversion therapy on a questioning child. But I’m in favour of questions.

KOK reminded me of DUNE, you may recall, but TGSET does so to such a degree that I’m sure Lynch was influenced by it. Those little snatches of internal monologue, the cutaways to weird observers,  the reverse clouds of billowing smoke imploding around Christ at the end, the opening starscape, and many more touches, suggest that Lynch saw this and was on some level impressed (he would have been a teenager when it opened). I’ve written before about how odd things seems to catch Lynch’s magpie eye and get reconfigured in his movies.

TGSET is so thronging with guest stars than proving overlap with Lynch’s work becomes too easy, and arguably meaningless, but I’d just like to mention that apart from the obvious Jose Ferrer and Max Von Sydow (in similar roles), we also have Roberts Loggia and Blake from LOST HIGHWAY. Although I know, because Lynch told me, that he cast Blake on the strength of his Johnny Carson appearances, and Loggia tried out for the part of Frank Booth in BLUE VELVET, Lynch inadvertently kept him waiting, and Loggia “became so angry it – just – wasn’t – funny,” which Lynch recalled when casting around for a belligerent gangster on the later film.

As with Lynch’s ponderous yet attractively peculiar religio-sci-fi flopperoo, the Stevens saga plunges us into an unfamiliar world and confuses us with explanations — all the expository dialogue just makes us more disoriented, but the settings are so striking and the weirder characters so much fun…

Right after those pompous credits, ignoring the faintly ludicrous icon on Max Von Christ, the mix from star-scape to lamp flame and the moving light softly picking out the animals in the stable.This strikes me as gorgeous, atmospheric, goose-pimply stuff. WHO IS THAT doing the voice-over? He’s awfully good at it.

Running out of time so I’ll need to talk about Stevens’ idiosyncratic use of the tableau approach another time. It’s the key to the film’s best and worst aspects…

Snowflake of Lumberton

What? Yes!

Snowflake, the black American comic actor showcased in numerous ’30s and ’30s films, and best-known for his appearances in Preston Sturges comedies, is a disturbing figure when seen with modern eyes. A gifted comic, he is generally cast in demeaning roles, as a half-witted servant or train porter, and he plays them to the hilt, without any obvious desire to subvert the stereotype or turn the joke around. At the same time, he’s an appealing sort of fellow, so his appearances often create a kind of sadness that colonises his scenes in a film and threatens to spill over. Another weird thing is that he always seems to be playing a character called Snowflake — in COME AND GET IT, he doesn’t get any lines or even any bits of comedy business, he just stands around grinning, but is referred to by Edward Arnold as “Snowflake” several times, raising the unresolved question of how Edward Arnold knows this guy so well.

Looking around the internet, not much seemed to be known about him – even his real name was in question – and then it turned out that, naturally, Diarmid Mogg of The Unsung Joe had uncovered the facts in the case of M. Snowflake, and he was kind enough to pass on to me the article he’d sourced (since Snowflake is actually TOO PROMINENT a movie actor to be featured on Diarmid’s very special site). Fascinating to discover that Snowflake, real name Buster Hayes (how can anyone called Buster require a nickname?), was born in the town where BLUE VELVET is set. Just think, if he had lived, he could have played one of the old guys working in Kyle MacLachlan’s garage.

Diarmid says:

“Well, Snowflake’s a guy who everyone’s got an opinion about, but no one knows anything about him beyond what they see on screen (which is pretty damning, obviously). How strange. He’s not even in “Blacks in Black and White”, my seemingly exhaustive reference book on black cinema. I guess people just can’t take him these days.

It’s quite unusual to find that someone as prolific as he was never appeared in the syndicated gossip or humour columns. Obviously, it’s partly because he’s black, but Clarence Muse appeared in the papers often enough.

Anyway, I can only find one decent article on him, but it’s a good one.”

Note — like Snowflake’s performances, this article is very much “of its time.”

FEBRUARY 12, 1942

Lumberton’s Only Actor, Snowflake, Tells How He Crashed The Movieland On Recent Visit To His Old Boss Here

By Ray Pittman

Lumberton’s only movie star is a toothsome darky by the name of Snowflake and one can look a far ways before he’ll find a more genteel colored man and yet a more determined cuss when the spirit gets behind him.

Snowflake, for example, went to a moving picture house in Chicago close to a decade ago and saw for his first time the antics of a slim, dark negro named Snowball, who was packing them in back in the thirties.

Snowflake, at that time Buster Hayes, decided point blank that he was going to be a movie star. He went back home, packed his grip, and hopped the rails for Hollywood.

In a matter-of-fact way, and in double quick time at that, the Raynham darky became a movie star—and one who has played in 360-odd pictures in his nine years in Hollywood.

He was never in doubt, was Snowflake. that he’d finally get in pictures. But the way he made the grade was, he’ll admit, just a little bit freakish though on conformity with the accepted Hollywood-crashing procedure. Let Snowflake tell it, as he told this Robesonian reporter during the actor’s recent visit to his old home here:

“Two Genulmans”

“I wuz in Los Angeles walking down the street when I sees two gennulmans standin’ on the corner. I commenced t’ask the gennulmans if they knew wheah I could find a job in the Moving pictures and they says ‘Yes, go to the Hollywood B and B club and tell ‘em there you wants a job.’ I went to Hollywood, but couldn’t find any such club, so I started back to Los Angeles.”

Here Snowflake believes he became confused and ended up on the set of some studio. At any rate, “two gennulmans” again enter the scene.

“I sees these two gennulmans standing together talking and by this time I’m broke. I commence to thinkin’ and wondrin’ how I’m goin’ to get back to Los Angeles and all at once I feels my harmonica in my pocket. I asks these gennulmans if they would mind me playin’ them a little tune for a dime. Well, instead, one of them gives me a dime and I tells him, ‘Thank you, SUH!’ and stahts to leave.

“About that time I heahs one of the gennulmans say to the other gennulman, ‘Hey, Weeks, he’s just the man we need,’ and then the other gennulman hollers at me and says, ‘Hey, come back heah, son!’ So I comes back.”

And to make a long story short, Snowflake was hired on the spot, he says, to do a bit part in Honeymoon Lane. The “two gennulmans” turned out to be “Mistuh Gawge Weeks and Mistuh Eddie Dowling”, the former a producer of his day and the latter the star of Honeymoon Lane.

Well, Snowflake, still going strong, has been in Hollywood ever since, playing bartenders and porters and valets and funny men in pictures of all sorts. Of late he’s appeared quite a bit in pictures starring Don Barry, the Red Rider.

In fact, if you went to the Pastime theatre Saturday, you saw Snowflake yourself. He was one of the ranch hands of the heroine of “Bad Men of Missouri”

Worked For Dr. Dowman

The adopted son of Moriah Munn of the Raynham section, Snowflake-Buster got his start in this world as a general handyman to Dr. E. L. Bowman when the Lumberton doctor was starting out with a practice in the town of McDonald. Dr. Bowman had one of the early “Model Ts” in this section and Snowflake swears he was chauffeuring it for the Doctor when he was only 12 years old.

In his early teens the wanderlust hit Buster and he hopped a work train out of .Lumberton, went to New York, and finally secured work on a train making a New York-Chicago run. It was on the Chicago end of this run that he first saw the show featuring Snowball and for the first time in his life gave a thought to making a living as a movie actor. Snowflake says he rode the rails back into New York, then chucked the works to go to Hollywood and become a movie star.

“I thought Hollywood and Los Angeles was just around the corner. As a matter of fact, I’d never heard of either one of them before.”

The Snowflake-to-be finally got to the West Coast, but not without a deal of hard work. He had to roll up his sleeves and do a little out-and-out work of every nature after his very very slim roll thinned out.

After he reached Los Angeles, he drove a truck for a while. But not for long. Snowflake was headed for the lights.

He’s Satisfied

He holds no grudge with the life Hollywood has handed him, and  is more than satisfied with the money and the compensations his roles have rewarded him with. He’s been married twice, and has dabbled in chicken and turkey farming.

As for the matrimonial ventures, Dr Bowman will tell you that the first of his wives “married him for his money”, then induced him into the chicken farming business.

Snowflake will laugh at this, as he did the other day in the Lumberton doctor’s office, then said: “I didn’t like chickens, ain’t never liked chickens. I got tired of lookin’ at ‘em” Snowflake divorced that wife; he’s getting along fine with his second.

Snowflake looked plenty “Hollywood” the other day in his green sport shirt, gray trousers, and yellow convertible automobile. But with it all he was just plain home folks and doggoned glad to be back in Lumberton for a few days.

It was his second trip home since he left Lumberton. The first time he was gone for 13 years, but he now plans to come more often.

Snowflake’s in his thirties and is perhaps a quarter of a century younger than is his stepmother, Moriah Munn of Raynham. Moriah has been mighty good to him in those years, he’ll tell you, for it was the little colored women who took him as a several-day-old baby and cared for him until he was able to fend for himself.

Mother Disappeared

There’s one thing that bothers Buster, and outside of that he belies his looks if he never had a care. Buster wants to know what became of his folks, and especially his mother, Bernice Hayes, who hasn’t been seen in these parts since soon after the birth of young Snowflake (His real name’s Fred).

If anybody is able to enlighten Buster as to the whereabouts of his mother, please shoot a postcard
in to the Robesonian. It will be forwarded to Snowflake out in Hollywood, and the boy will certainly appreciate it.

And if you want to see Lumberton’s only movie actor on the screen, just watch for the new production “Palm Beach Story” starring Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea.

Snowflake will be the big, scared bartender on a fast train. But we’ll bet he gets in one good solid grin so you can recognize him.

Big Bad Night

Christopher Weedman is possibly the world expert on actor Donald Pleasence — he certainly has an unbeatable enthusiasm for that fine thespian’s work. For years he’s supplied me with fine quality movies from the US, until my shelving groans and warps beneath the accumulated weight.

In exchange I’ve been able to supply him with a few oddities, including a rare Pleasence TV interview, and the novelty Public Information Film LONELY WATER, narrated by the Great Pleasence, which so traumatised millions of kids around my age in the UK back in the ’70s. Warning: This Film Will Shit You Up Big Style.

Although intended as a gentle warning to schoolkids, and screened amid children’s programming, the short’s more natural home would be as support to Nic Roeg’s DON’T LOOK NOW… (Which would make an ideal “See Venice and Die” Fever Dream Double Feature with Schrader’s THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS.)

Anyhow, through a strange turn of events, I acquired a copy of Joseph Losey’s M (thanks, Brandon!) just as Chris was preparing to write something about Losey, and so another trade was swiftly consummated — David Ehrenstein and Dan Sallitt had both been commending THE BIG NIGHT as one of Losey’s very best US films, and Chris was able to send me a copy.

It more than lives up to the praise.

Losey’s films, to which I am only just becoming acclimatized, seem to fall into two camps: some are weird, disjointed, tonally or structurally peculiar — fascinating for their weaknesses as much of their strengths. His failures (a personal selection: BOOM!; MODESTY BLAISE; THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR; SECRET CEREMONY; THESE ARE THE DAMNED) are more fascinating than many filmmakers’ successes. The other films are maybe still strange, but so thematically and structurally tight and well-organised, that their weirdness passes by as the most natural thing in the world. The theatrical dialogue and pacing of KING AND COUNTRY, and its tiny set, and Reginald Mill’s dislocated cutting, which drops odd inserts of pre-war life into the trenches, are part of a concept so unified and well thought-through that nothing can be questioned. The Pinter-scripted films are certainly peculiar, but the strangeness feels wholly necessary. THE PROWLER unfolds with the urgency and predestined horror of a bad dream.

THE BIG NIGHT is deeply strange, in a way that’s hard to pin down but seems very forcefully present, unavoidable. John Barrymore Jnr. plays a teenager seeking to avenge his father, who has been publicly beaten and humiliated by Al Judge, crippled sports writer. The film follows the boy through a long, long night, as he tries to track down the celebrity and confront him, seemingly with no definite plan of what to do when they meet — though he’s brought a gun along.

Complicating matters is Barrymore’s emotionally distant relationship with his father — he loves him but can’t communicate with him. Who is he avenging? Is this whole scheme just an attempt to get his father’s attention? This is very much a film about dads — JB Jnr. lived very much in the shadow of his famous father, and resembles John Barrymore caught in the act of morphing into Drew Barrymore. The fact that putative villain Al Judge is a sports writer, like uncredited screenwriter Ring Lardner Jnr’s famous dad, and the fact that the actor playing him (Howard St. John, beautifully repulsive) closely resembles Losey, and therefore perhaps Losey’s father, is all pretty fascinating.

The film positively invites one of those dull Freudian readings — bad father usurps the place of good father, and son must destroy him in order to become a man. It’s very much like the arc of Lynch’s BLUE VELVET, which author JG Ballard has subjected to a rigidly psychoanalytic reading, complete with primal scene (“Mommy loves you!”), but while the reading may be valid, and in Losey’s case quite possibly intended, to reduce the film solely to this schematic is to do it a disservice. Whatever the value of dream analysis, to translate a nightmare into symbols and archetypes is to rob it of much of its resonance and terror.

One of the odd thrills of the film is the strange way Al Judge is presented. Surrounded by goons and hangers-on (including the magnificently depraved Emile Meyer (from SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS — “C’m'ere, I wanna chastise ya!”) and regarded with fear and awe by everybody from cops to stationers (yes, even the stationers fear him!), he should be rights be a gang lord, not a sports writer. The film’s vision of the sports writer as all-powerful demi-god seems strange to me, rather like regarding The Guardian’s football columnist Russell Brand as Satan. Actually, maybe not so odd.

Howard St John gives the performance of the film, and of his life-time, a seething portrait of wickedness which surprises just because it’s so unconnected to his perfectly plausible psychological motivation. Judge, whose name comes to feel symbolic, but not in a CLEAR way, is awful out of all proportion to his situation, just as he’s powerful out of all proportion to his role in society. The journey to face him is frightening and suspenseful in part because we already have an idea how bad he is, and it pays off dramatically when he proves himself even worse than we suspected.

And when the villain turns out to have a pretty strong motivation for his foul act, yet still acts like a depraved sleazoid, we’re in Lynch territory again — some people are just EVIL. While the rich and powerful turning out to be corrupt and vicious seems understandable in a film made by left-wingers, the pervading sense of cruelty and viciousness in the film lacks any obvious motivation. We first meet the Great Profile Jnr. being bullied by other kids, and the barflies in his father’s joint seem like rubberneckers at an accident during and after the beating, and the news quickly spreads to the stationer’s next door, where one weedy customer clearly regards it as a Big Joke. Cops are corrupt and the only intellectual is a weak and unreliable drunkard.

Adding to the oddness is the shoehorning of other issues into the narrative, with singer Mauri Lynn as The Tragedy of Race in America. Her role comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, but allows for a beautiful scene, and if it doesn’t really belong I can’t fault the filmmakers for wanting to raise the issue — certainly nobody was going to invite Losey and Lardner to make a whole film about the subject.

There’s Dorothy Comingore, too, soon to vanish from the screen as the McCarthy era began in earnest. Directors and writers could more easily work abroad and under pseudonyms (Losey’s included Andrea Forzano, Terence Hanbury, Joseph Walton), but film actors, whose faces were their fortunes, could be totally eradicated by blacklisting, especially if they lacked experience in theatre. Comingore’s gentle yet somewhat bitter performance here, far more modulated than her similar drunken good-time gal in CITIZEN KANE, is a sad reminder of the kind of talent the film industry squandered.

The movie isn’t your typical noir – the teen hero differentiates it at once, and Losey’s sympathy for the young man straining towards adulthood connects him to his fellow Wisconsonite Nick Ray and REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE — both films are unusual 50s stories for the seriousness and sympathy they apply to the problems of the young. Losey’s own fatherly concern for Barrymore was grotesquely betrayed when JB confessed, much later, to having followed Losey around, reporting to the F.B.I. on any suspiciously commie activities.

In his leading role here, John Drew Barrymore’s not exactly charismatic — he’s not his father or even his daughter — but he starts to exert a curious counter-charismatic appeal. He’s authentically awkward and self-conscious. The performance seems to mature as the character does. He ultimately seems more affecting and honest than a more slick or handsome boy might have been. And his very unsuitability for leading man status is appropriate to a film as off-centre, unglamorous and unpredictable as this.