For a comedy that starts with the lead character (Keir Gilchrist) contemplating suicide and set in a mental hospital, this isn’t as black as you’d think. Young Craig is a prep-school kid struggling with his desire to please his workaholic dad, his attraction to his best friend’s girl, and the pressures of school. He doesn’t really want to kill himself, but a short voluntary commitment seems like a good opportunity to sort things out.
Notwithstanding the setting, he manages to meet a girl (Emma Roberts). And a new friend, played by Zach Galifianakis. Galifianakis threatens to become the most unlikely household name since “Schwarzeneggar.” The burly actor isn’t much like the Governator, but his full beard and daft persona are nearly as distinct as Schwarzeneggar’s Austrian monotone. He played the oddest characters in both The Hangover and Dinner for Schmucks—which is saying something—but here for the first time is an actual mental patient. And yet here he’s relatively normal. A few of the other patients, like Craig’s catatonic roommate, border on “zany,” but the principal characters are fairly realistic. Gilchrist (of The United States of Tara) does a nice job and looks the age he’s playing. (He kind of also looks like Justin Long’s younger brother, but without projecting smarminess.)
The writer-director team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck previously made Half Nelson and Sugar, which had the odd laugh but were practically docudramas in terms of style. Those had original screenplays, but in this case, they are adapting a Ned Vizzini novel. Possibly for that reason, there is a lighter feel. Boden and Fleck incorporate fantasy sequences and even a bit of animation. The movie may annoy some with its glib attitude toward overcoming mental illness, a point actually addressed in the voiceover. Only in Roberts’s character (and occasionally with Galifianakis’s) do we get the sense of someone who is truly, and non-comically, wounded psychologically. But this is best viewed as a coming-of-age story with a novel setting and a few laughs. Not a bad thing, that.
IMDB link
viewed 9/16/10 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/17 and 10/8/10
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