"The nail that sticks up is the one that's hammered down."
-Japanese proverb

Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War--an expansion of Catcher in the Rye's first chapters, or Dead Poet's Society with sharper teeth, take your pick--was my favourite book in high schoolso for years I feared the film version. Last week, I hunkered down before the set to bite the bullet at last; no matter how deviant the movie was, I could forever cling to the memory of that first read in tenth grade. The opening moments of likeable actor Keith Gordon's directorial debut (he played the psycho-nerd in John Carpenter's banal Christine) put me at ease. This 1988 adaptation is by no means letter-faithful, but the grim tone of the book is preserved and the alterations are exciting.

Ilan Mitchell-Smith stars as Jerry Renault, the new kid at all-boys Catholic school Trinity and thus fresh food for the Vigils, an underground student organization fond of rattling the cages of both students and teachers alike with complex practical jokes. Publicly represented by the snake-charming Archie ("The Larry Sanders Show"'s Wally Langham, née Ward, barely recognizable here), the Vigils convince Jerry to refuse participation in the school's annual fundraiser--a chocolate sale--for ten days.

At the end of his "mission," however, Jerry continues to say "no," causing much consternation for terrible Brother Leon (John Glover), who reluctantly enlists the Vigils to undo their all-too-effective handiwork. Jerry, you see, has become a glamourous symbol of rebellion at the school; overall sales have dipped at a time when Trinity desperately needs the extra funds.

Gordon's compression of several chapters into beautiful, static montages may have been influenced by time or budgetary constraints, but this stripped-down approach captures the simple poetry of Cormier's prose well. The movie is often like watching a bizarre tango between the no-frills aesthetic of Cassavetes and the big-budget minimalism of Kubrick--at times, the camera placement and direction of actors has improvisational zing, while at others, there is a methodical, antispontaneity to the proceedings that is equally engrossing.

This is an inspiring first effort from Gordon full of great performances; Glover is pure malevolence, and Ward is outstanding--Gordon's interpretation of the novel wisely plants omnisexual Archie, a tragic figure all his own, at the forefront, allowing for a more ambiguous line to be drawn between the good guys and the bad. (This was also a good decision because Movie Jerry is problematic: his introversion on paper was somewhat painful to behold, and his quiet protest cathartic, not unlike like that of Melville's Bartleby, but cinematically the character walks a fine line between shy and dull.)

Where the book was almost exclusively an attack on conformity (or, at least, a dark-hearted meditation on attacking conformity), exaggerated by its religious setting (in the film, those boxes of chocolates that Brother Leon hawks even resemble The Good Book, giving the sales campaign the air of door-to-door Bible-thumping), Gordon is after something more complex. His ending, which sticks it to elitism but still manages to avoid a clear victory for Jerry, is less downbeat yet even more shattering than the text's. With a new-wave soundtrack featuring the likes of Yaz and Peter Gabriel, The Chocolate War is a hipper and more perceptive take on separate school life (and, to that end, teenaged boys) than most pictures of such ilk. I needn't have put off seeing it this long.-Bill Chambers