Hellion

I can’t decide if Kat Candler’s Hellion is bogged in the mire or mired in the bog of its own indiness, but it’s one or the other. Everything about it is so indie that it feels like it’s following a formula as rigid as that of any romcom or teen-meat-on-the-hoof slasher picture. It dwells in the lower depths of cardboard suburbia. It features characters you’d probably cross the street to avoid in real life. And, though it eschews outright shaky-cam, it’s awash in hand-held queasy-cam. Predictably, a great many otherwise sensible folks are waxing rhapsodic over the profundity of its “realism.” (Whether or not any of them have actual first-hand knowledge of the kind of lives depicted here is another matter that is not addressed.) If anything, I’m surprised that it hasn’t been more praised than it has. The truth is that it’s not exactly a bad movie, within the limited confines of its aims. But those confines are extremely limited.

Hellion is a fairly generic work of the disaffected child subgenre — an easy favorite of indie filmmakers — that neither shows, nor tells you anything you haven’t seen before or didn’t already know. It seems, based on its look and nearly all heavy metal soundtrack, to take place in some not-too-distant past (or in a place where things change very little and very slowly). It’s all about a dysfunctional family (in indie films — drama or comedy — there is no other kind) living in the lowest of the lower end of suburbia in Port Arthur, Texas. We have Hollis (TV actor Aaron Paul), a neglectful dad drowning his sorrows over his dead wife, and his two sons, Jacob (Josh Wiggins) and Wes (Deke Garner), who are pretty much left to their own devices. The older Jacob (the hellion of the title) is bored and angered by the neglect and drifts into juvenile delinquency and vandalism that will pretty quickly send him on a reform school stint. Faster than you can say “social services,” the younger Wes is taken from Hollis and sent to live with his aunt (Juliette Lewis). This only depresses Hollis further and drags Jacob further into rebellion. Things get worse, and then there’s a heavy-handed dose of melodrama.

If you can’t tell from that, this movie fairly bristles with clichés. As usual in such cases, Josh Wiggins’ performance is being called brilliant and other hyperbolic things, and, as usual, it’s because the young actor is really good at being inarticulate and looking sullen. It is something of a given with this type of film that reality is depicted by showing teenage boys as oafish dullards, doing nothing, talking about nothing and swearing a lot. Hellion is no slouch in this department. I am not quite sure how or why aimlessness has come to be viewed as profound, but it has. Now, having said that, I will give credit to Hellion for giving Jacob an interest in life — becoming a dirt-bike champion — besides vandalism and assorted mayhem. It also gives his story something of a viable dramatic arc in his uncomprehendingly childish (well, he’s 13) attempts to reunite his family. That these are ultimately hobbled by melodrama doesn’t completely destroy it. I can’t honestly recommend the film, but I’m sure it has its audience. However, it’s apt to be a smallish one, so those interested probably oughtn’t dally. Not Rated but contains language, adult themes, and young boys behaving badly.