Skateboarding his way into acceptance

Actor Jonah Hill makes an interesting directorial debut with mid90s, a movie about a kid looking for a place in the world.

Although mid90s, the directorial debut of actor Jonah Hill, deals with Los Angeles' skateboard culture during the 1990s, the movie isn't a flashy accumulation of tricks, stunts and teenage daring. That's because there's something touching at the heart of Hill's directorial debut, the loneliness of a 13-year-old boy with a bully for a brother and a desire to be accepted by his peers.

Sunny Suljic portrays Stevie, a kid who finds that acceptance among a diverse group of skateboarders who offer Stevie escape from his surroundings, a single mom (Katherine Waterston) who had kids too early and an older brother (Lucas Hedges) who regularly beats him up.

Before I saw mid90s, I worried that Hill, who also wrote the screenplay, would be hitchhiking off skateboard culture, siphoning off its language and energy and calling it his own. But by using a convincing cast of actors and by excavating memories of a scene in which he once participated, Hill takes us on an authentic and entertaining foray into the lives of teenagers who essentially are growing up on their own.

Stevie falls in with a rough and ready bunch after being introduced to the group by Ruben (Gio Galacia), a kid who instructs Stevie never to thank him. Thanks are for "gays," says Ruben. Take that as part of the posturing that seems to come naturally to these young men. As one of the youngest in his crew, Ruben's needs to present a tough front. You can almost feel him straining to prove himself and he probably lures Stevie into the group so that someone else can play the goat role.

Suljic goes through much of the movie with a smile pasted on his face; it's a kid-in-the-candy-store look of a young man who's learning about a world that opens its doors to him as the boys school him the ways of skateboarding, although it left me wondering whether Suljic's performance could have benefited from some shading.

The skateboard crew is a scruffy bunch. Olan Prenatt portrays a curly-haired kid who saunters his way into a drinking problem. Na-kel Smith portrays Ray, a kid who aspires to go pro with his skateboarding career. It should give you a clue as to the movie's impolite tone that Prenatt's character is named "Fuckshit."

The skateboarder nicknamed "Fourth Grade" (Ryder McLaughlin) constantly takes videos of the group, a motif that results in a late-picture payoff.

Hill obtains mostly credible performances from his young cast. Hedges (Manchester by the Sea, Lady Bird, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) seems to be on a different level than the rest, adding a bruised emotional life to his portrayal of Stevie's brutalizing older brother, Ian. Stevie, who sometimes sneaks into his brother's room, which he regards reverentially, may be too young to understand his brother's torments.

Hill seems most concerned with Stevie's ability to find a place among his peers while taking his lumps. At one point, Ray tells Stevie that he has an unrivaled capacity for absorbing "hits." Stevie brims with pride even though Ray has enough maturity to know that Stevie doesn't really have to beat himself up to prove his worth.

These kids thrive on taunting one another and they aren't exactly role models when it comes to the girls they encounter. But they're also capable of surprising displays of tenderness and humanity, shown in a respectful encounter with a homeless man and in a scene in which Ray consoles Stevie after he's humiliated in front of the group by his irate mother. She's furious that the boys have introduced Stevie to drinking and pot.

That scene ends with Ray urging Stevie back onto his skateboard and onto the street where they coast along. And that, it seems to me is what the movie's really about: the way -- at certain times in one's life -- there's nothing better than friends, hitting the streets and finding a groove that makes you feel a little more at home in a world that hurts more than you're ever willing to admit.

An intriguing start, but where's the payoff?

Another strange movie from the director of The Lobster.

A skilled surgeon and his anesthesiologist walk down a hospital hallway after performing open-heart surgery. Rather than talk about the operation they’ve just performed, they exchange banalities about their high-priced wristwatches. Later the surgeon, meets with a young man and gives him a gift, an expensive watch. The conversations in these two scenes are conducted without benefit of inflection or emphasis. For all the color the actors bring to their dialogue, they might as well be reciting grocery lists.

In these scenarios, relationships and motivations become blank slates, and we -- the audience -- labor to comprehend the meaning of everything we see.

Are these doctors so insensitive that they can talk about nothing more than the quality of their watches? And what is the relationship of the physician to the young man we've just seen? Could the young man be a son from some now-dissolved marriage? Is this meeting about something stranger than an awkward reunion?

All of this occurs in the opening moments of director Yorgos Lanthimos's The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a revenge saga played out in an atmosphere of provocative obfuscation. Lanthimos, who directed the much-admired but often cryptic The Lobster (2016), has proven himself a master at holding an audience in what might be called "active suspension," a state of heightened attentiveness in which much is suggested but little is clarified.

I'm a partisan of this approach to filmmaking, the kind in which images, music, and performance continually force us to look for meaning. But such filmmaking also can prove risky. Often, it can't be maintained for a two-hour running time. Eventually, the filmmaker must get down to business and create some sort of plot.

It's at this pivotal point that Lanthimos's effort begins to crumble, and we face the slow dawning of an unfortunate realization; the keenness of observation Lanthimos has demanded of us may not yield the hoped-for payoff.

Any actor who works with Lanthimos must adapt to the director's style, something in the way that actors who appear in a David Mamet production must submit to the loaded cadences in which Mamet's characters speak.

In that regard, the actors in The Killing of a Sacred Deer do admirable work. Colin Farrell plays Steven Murphy, heart surgeon and wristwatch enthusiast. Nicole Kidman portrays his wife, Anna, an eye doctor. The Murphy's have two children: Kim (Raffey Cassidy), a teenager, and Bob (Sunny Suljic), a long-haired boy with a near-angelic look.

The mysterious young man mentioned earlier (Barry Keoghan) mixes politeness and threat, a cross between Eddie Haskell, the obnoxiously polite kid on Leave it to Beaver, and serial killer Ted Bundy.

Alicia Silverstone shows up briefly as Martin's mother, a woman who hopes Steven will assuage her loneliness by becoming her lover. Martin eggs her on in this delusion.

Now, if you don't want to know anything more, I suggest you stop here. At the risk of introducing spoilers, I must tell you that Martin poses an increasingly grave danger to the Murphy family. It seems that Martin's father died after Steven operated on the ailing man. Martin blames Steven and aims to settle the score. He informs Steven that if the good doctor doesn't kill either his wife or one of his children, each will become ill and die. How Martin intends to fulfill this malignant promise remains a mystery.

Dipping into Greek mythology and who knows what else, Lanthimos deftly keeps us inside his bubble of suspense, sometimes nudging us toward the comic absurdity of Steven's situation. The security of an affluent family suddenly is threatened, which means -- of course -- that it had no real security in the first place.

Farrell's bushy beard seems to throw his face into a perpetual scowl. Kidman manages to be a credible denizen of Lanthimos's strangely concocted world. Before Steven and Anna make love, Anna sprawls across the bed in her underwear, lies perfectly still and invites Steven to proceed by uttering the least romantic words ever heard in a sex scene; i.e., "general anesthesia." Sex becomes an operation, and Anna seems to be saying, "Have at it. I won't feel a thing."

The movie's best performance belongs to Keoghan who has the capacity simultaneously to alarm and reassure; Martin's twisted sincerity makes it seem as if perfect logic supports the young man's insane plan.

If you want to enlarge your interpretation of the movie, you can view the story as a stage in which karmic forces clash: Steven must be punished for being a successful doctor who may once have been negligent. Or maybe he's being punished for living an affluent life in the movie's unnamed city or for cutting himself off from his emotions or ... You can fill in your own blanks.

Whatever Lanthimos wants to say falls prey to the fact that the movie becomes less intriguing as it goes on, so much so that the denouement of Lanthimos's drama feels abstract and remote rather than shockingly tragic.

Augmented by the cool tones of cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis's lighting, Killing of a Sacred Deer evokes depths it's unable to plumb. In the end, the movie may amount to little more than a complex expression of a familiar adage: Payback's a bitch.

Fair enough, but this could be a case in which a movie's cruelty doesn't hurt enough because its creators can't entirely solve the problem of making the conceptional battle between an arrogant doctor and the evil he arouses into something that comes screaming to life. Lanthimos may have been defeated by his own considerable artistic impulses: Putting a movie under “general anesthesia” risks not being able to rouse it again.