Boy (M). Director: Taika Waititi. Starring: James Rolleston, Taika Waititi, Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu. Running time: 87 minutes
This Kiwi coming-of-age comedy won the Audience Award at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and it's not hard to see why. It is an accessible and idiosyncratic film with the heart and social conscience of Once Were Warriors and the endearingly offbeat comic sensibilities of Napoleon Dynamite.
Its hero, known to friends, family and teachers simply as Boy (Rolleston), is an 11-year-old Maori youth living on a rural property at Waihau Bay, New Zealand, in 1984. He is a young boy with grown-up responsibilities: when his grandmother goes out of town, she leaves him as the man of the house, responsible for looking after his bother Rocky (Aho Eketone-Whitu) and assorted younger cousins.
Boy's mother, we learn, died some years previously, and his father, who abandoned them, is lately in prison. None of this does anything to dampen Boy's exuberance for life (brought to bear with irreverent charm by talented first-timer Rolleston), or his hero worship of his absentee father Alamein (Waititi, also the film's writer and director).
When Alamein does return, suddenly and unexpectedly, with a couple of seedy mates in tow, Boy is determined to hang on to his heroic preconceptions. Despite all evidence to the contrary.
Boy adheres to a coming-of-age formula where childhood is a place of blissful ignorance that is gradually toppled by knowledge and experience: knowledge plus experience equals growing up, and growing up is painful. The film reinforces this by harking to a more idyllic time and place that are, respectively, past and remote. These innocent environs are impinged upon by ill forces borne by damaged adults: the violence and drug cultivation perpetrated by the father of Boy's friend; the alcohol and anarchy that Alamein brings to Boy's world.
Even Boy's fanaticism for Michael Jackson, a running gag throughout the film, provides more than period detail. It foreshadows the scars that the passage of time can leave upon things we hold dear. In 1984 Jackson is at his artistic and popular peak: pre-surgery, pre-child abuse allegations and all the other things that later marred his public persona. Boy's worship is, for now, pure. As an audience watching in 2010 we know the purity is transient.
In fact Boy's Jackson-worship epitomises his youthful idealism. Even a barroom brawl is transformed in Boy's head into a version of
Jackson's 'Beat It' music video,