This Boy's Life (1993)

USA, 115 minutes
Director: Michael Caton-Jones
Writers: Tobias Wolff, Robert Getchell
Photography: David Watkin
Music: Carter Burwell
Editor: Jim Clark
Cast: Robert De Niro, Ellen Barkin, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Blechman, Eliza Dushku, Chris Cooper, Carla Gugino, Zachary Ansley, Tobey Maguire

This Boy's Life is something less than the sum of its many promising parts. Set in Concrete, Washington, in the late '50s and early '60s, and based on Tobias Wolff's excellent memoir of the same name, it also assembles an impressive cast in Ellen Barkin, Robert De Niro, and the young and skinny Leonardo DiCaprio. DiCaprio was not yet 20 when this was made, though it was already his third feature film after establishing himself in TV. (When the time comes to vote for postage stamp images of DiCaprio, I'm pretty sure I will choose young-and-skinny, unlike my preference for the Elvis Presley.) The problem may be in director Michael Caton-Jones or screenwriter Robert Getchell or both. They were relatively untried then (and have not done much I know since), and both came with apparent debts to Martin Scorsese.

Certainly the opening here is reminiscent of Goodfellas, from only a few years earlier, with its voiceover narrative approach and even more in its attempt to pump up an instant big soundtrack moment with a '50s oldies, a strategy that recurs often here. The many songs that populate the soundtrack remain basically wonderful—that's Frank Sinatra's "Let's Get Away From It All" in the open, and others here, among a couple of dozen, include Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues," Nat King Cole's "Smile," and the Everly Brothers' "Bye Bye Love." But the magic with the narrative or the images somehow rarely ever happens, though it's nice to hear the songs. At the same time, the dynamic between Tobias Wolff (DiCaprio), or "Jack" as he wants to be called for most of this movie (after Jack London, a nice point), and his mother Caroline (Barkin) is straight out of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore—which, it turns out, Getchell wrote, along with many episodes of the follow-on TV series. You get the feeling of déjà vu a lot when you're looking at This Boy's Life.



The basic problem to me is that it distorts the original memoir to make it work as a specific kind of movie, which happened to be rather popular at the time: the abuse situation drama. Launched, perhaps, by 1984's TV movie The Burning Bed, by the '90s it held a certain familiar vogue, whose rhythms were known and recognizable at all levels of good and bad filmmaking: Sleeping With the Enemy, If Someone Had Known, Bastard Out of Carolina, Once Were Warriors, and countless numbers on the Lifetime channel. It even played out in public, in a bizarre way, in the Supreme Court justice confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, with Anita Hill's confrontation of him. As with This Boy's Life, these dramas incorporate what we know of the psychology of the situations, the way they move and explode, the way they look and feel.

We knew the drill well by the time of this movie. Robert De Niro is Dwight, the stepfather whom the compulsively itinerant Caroline marries out of desperation to escape impoverishment. Predictably, De Niro is very good at being malevolent and creepy, and to his credit, he even finds fresh new ways to do it here, working a variation on the soft-spoken Rupert Pupkin as a seething small-town Navy veteran and auto mechanic. At first he seems like just a mild-mannered dork, making corny dad jokes and being pleasant, but soon enough the hard edges show, the insecurities and the childish levels he descends to in his furies, his whole sick worldview. It's not hard to imagine him as a Trump supporter in his 70s today. De Niro is good at this, but he's also running in place, as he had been increasingly since at least Goodfellas, with roles in movies such as Cape Fear, goofing on his preestablished persona and our expectations. For that matter, even Goodfellas was running in place, but it's also a kind of apotheosis of what he does best.

Some of the best scenes in This Boy's Life are good in spite of feeling so didactic, as one scene where we see illustrated how the abuser controls a household with enforced silence and his moods. Caroline and Jack are having a cheerful conversation about positive developments in Jack's life, which sends Dwight into an infantile rage of jealousy. Dwight's formal complaint is that they are talking too loud for him to enjoy the phonograph record he's playing, but at that point they are sullenly forced to acknowledge the choice he offers them to either shut up or put up with his rage, and they do what Dwight wants.

This Boy's Life is not without its effects—you feel manipulated but also helplessly exhilarated when Caroline and Jack are finally poised to take action and get away from Dwight. Bring a hanky for the closing scenes, just in case. It also has a great feel for the midcentury American West, when Phoenix and Seattle were much different fantasy destinations from what they are now, and cars were like chariots over the Great Plains and desert. Lots of great oldies on the soundtrack. A chance to see De Niro work out some of the fine kinks in his routine, and to see DiCaprio studying De Niro closely. Another chance to see Ellen Barkin. And some valuable lessons to mull over about abusers and abuse. But, to be clear, and to sound a tired old note, the book is better—much, much better.