**/****
starring Taika Waititi, James Rolleston, Te Aho Eketone-Whitu
written and directed by Taika Waititi
by Alex Jackson Taika Waititi's Boy has one thing to say and spends 87 minutes saying it. Its message is basically that best friends are poor substitutes for fathers. Eleven-year-old New Zealander Boy (James Rolleston) idealizes his absentee dad Alamein (writer-director Waititi), who has spent the past seven years in prison for robbery. Returning home to dig up the loot he buried before getting caught, Alamein casually re-establishes a relationship with Boy by feeding him beer and initiating him into the world of "men." In exchange, Boy helps him look for his money and gives him marijuana stolen from a classmate's illegal farm. There's admittedly something very slippery about Boy. It's cute and quirky and even fun. Waititi is too adventurous a filmmaker to make a boring movie. Among the many tricks and gimmicks he employs, I particularly liked a sequence where Alamein paints with light to entertain his son. But gradually, without any change to the tone of the film or the nature of the character (he never becomes abusive or cruel towards Boy), we go from seeing Alamein's immaturity as charmingly anarchic to seeing it as repulsively irresponsible. Boy never really proselytizes, but it doesn't develop or deepen, either. Waititi's strategy is to give us so much of the comically buffoonish man-child Alamein that we grow to kind of hate him. This is problematic for a number of reasons. First and foremost, perhaps, is that it renders Boy too superficial to be a satisfying filmgoing experience. Secondly, it overly minimizes the horror of adult irresponsibility. There's a shot late in the film where Boy sips on a beer and smokes a reefer, yet the movie effectively denies that Boy is being corrupted and losing his innocence in this moment by suggesting he's only copying his father, whose lifestyle he will ultimately find wanting. Finally, while I admire that Boy is attempting to dismantle the "cult of childhood" genre by taking it to its logical end, I think Waititi underestimates the awesome power of pop culture. Boy's hero is "Thriller"-era Michael Jackson and he often fantasizes his father dancing like him–but Waititi fails to adequately evoke the irony of Boy idolizing a man with such a public Peter Pan complex. In the end, Boy doesn't challenge our love of pop culture so much as simply pander to it.
