JESUS HENRY CHRIST DVD (2012) |
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SYNOPSIS: Precocious doesn't even begin to describe ten year old Henry James Herman, a rabble-rousing boy genius, Henry has his entire world turned upside down when - to the dismay of his single mother - he embarks on a hilarious journey in search of the biological father he's never known.
MOVIE REVIEW:
Channelling his inner Wes Anderson, writer/ director Dennis Lee turns his 2003 short about a test-tube baby with the titular name into a full-length feature film with diminishing returns. The conceit of such a child searching for his biological father may have been cute as an 18-min movie, but Lee struggles too hard to keep his movie eccentric throughout the 90-min runtime, and the end result is an utterly caricatured portrayal of an unconventional family that hardly rings true.
One senses something off right from the beginning when Henry (Jason Spevack) introduces his family. Straddling the line between comedy and tragedy and entirely missing the point, Lee paints a multigenerational portrait that includes his mother Patricia (Toni Collette) setting off an accidental fire on her 10th birthday that kills her mother, his two policemen uncles so engrossed in quarrelling with each other in a squad car that they end up killing themselves, AIDS taking another sibling, and his grandfather Stan (Frank Moore) left in the care of Patricia.
Because Patricia is also a left-wing feminist who wanted a child but not a husband, Henry was conceived with the help of a sperm donor, who may or may not be the academic Dr. Slavkin O'Hara (Michael Sheen). It’s not enough that the precocious Henry has issues of his own; Lee throws in yet another troubled teenager, Slavin’s own daughter Audrey (Samantha Weinstein), who’s been the subject of his experiment in parenting about sexual identity and hence become the stock of her peers’ jeers about her lesbianism.
So Henry wants a father and Audrey hates hers, and the fact that they are both referring to the same person therefore making them half-siblings and bound by blood (at least half) to each other. What’s the point of all this? It isn’t clear even by the time they become one big happy dysfunctional family following the death of Grandpa Stan, even though we suspect that this is supposed to be a lesson about accepting family in the way that they come, gay or straight, artificial or natural.
Little rings true in Lee’s tableaux of corrosive family dynamics. The dialogue seems manufactured in order to sound witty. The hijinks that the characters find themselves in are farcical to say the least. And the tone, oh the tone, veers from tasteless to trite to trying to ultimately off-putting. The only worthy mention here is the cast, both Collette and Sheen such professional actors that they make the best of what little is given to them. Ditto for the young actors Spevack and Weinstein, the latter in particular always arresting delivering barb after barb with a stoic look.
Still, there is a sense of futility to the entire exercise in histrionics and all-too deliberate quirkiness - right down to its intentionally provocative title. Lee is no Wes Anderson, and ‘Jesus Henry Christ’ barely redeems the even more significant misfire that was his feature filmmaking debut ‘Fireflies in the Garden’; unfortunately, his ‘Fireflies’ star Julia Roberts’ hope is hugely misplaced, and this Roberts-produced film is neither funny nor insightful despite aspiring to be both. It is, like Henry, a test-tube of a movie.
AUDIO/VISUAL:
The Dolby Digital 2.0 delivers clear audio, while visuals look slightly over-saturated.
MOVIE RATING:
DVD RATING :
Review by Gabriel Chong
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