*SPOILERS*
The Washington Post
On ScreenDissecting States Of Mind
By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff WriterWe are the sum of the people whose lives touch ours. That seems to be the message, or at least one of the messages, of "The United States of Leland, " a compelling, exquisitely acted drama about the shock waves emanating from - and toward - a single act of almost inexplicable violence.
I say almost inexplicable because, while filmmaker Matthew Ryan Hoge argues, on the one hand, that we can never fully know another human being, let alone understand why he has done something, the writer-director cannot resist the impulse to seek answers through his art for that which life remains mute about.
This is, after all, what writers do, is it not? They seek answers to the unanswer- able whys of the universe, imposing an artificial order, a structure, if you will, on the chaos of existence. To drive this point home, there are several writer characters in this most writerly of films.
First and foremost is the titular Leland. As played by Ryan Gosling, whose understated performance at times seems to suggest that one of his "United States" is the state of catatonia, the character is frustratingly inarticulate in conversation, particularly when discussing the circumstances surrounding his attack on the retarded younger brother (Michael Welch) of his girlfriend, Becky (Jena Malone). Yet when given a blank journal by a teacher with the unusual name of Pearl (Don Cheadle) at the juvenile detention facility Leland has been sent to, the boy fills it up with his surpassingly philosophical musings on the nature of existence, right and wrong, and causality. These journal musings, and the flashbacks they stimulate, provide the structure for Hoge's film, which might be called an ontological murder mystery.
So, too, Leland's famous novelist father (Kevin Spacey) is an emotionally withholding jerk in person. Yet on paper, he is capable of creating the most moving words, both outer and inner. Only in his fiction, then, is he capable of expressing such things as the love he cannot show his son, except in monetary ways. Is he to blame, because of his estrangement from Leland, for what happened? Certainly, in part, but no more than anyone else that the teenage boy came into contact with.
One of those people, of course, is Pearl, an aspiring writer himself, and one who hopes that by peering into Leland's mind, he will discover the makings of his own book. Although Pearl didn't meet Leland until after the crime, the film makes it clear that even Pearl, in ways he does not see until it is too late, will affect the boy's life to come.
Other characters, large and small, circle in and out of Leland's orbit. There's the revenge-seeking father of the slain boy (Martin Donovan), as well as the victim's second sister (Michelle Williams) and her absurdly devoted boyfriend (Chris Klein), a good kid who blames Leland when, in the wake of the killing, his own world starts to crumble. There's also an older woman (Sherilyn Fenn), and the suggestion of a sexual liaison with Leland that may or may not have played a role in the chain of events leading up to the tragedy. Although I say "chain," it is clear that Hoge's movie means to question whether life even works that sequential way.
That's the essential - and essentially paradoxical - point of Hoge's art: That art itself exists to provide, or at least seek, the clarity that we do not find in the real world. That's true even if the explicit message of that art is that there is not, and never can be, any clarity whatsoever.
April 2, 2004
© 2004 The Washington Post Company ~
The Washington Post
On ScreenThe Family Filmgoer
by Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington PostSomber, well-acted but pretentious drama told in collage-like fragments, about privileged teenager (Ryan Gosling) jailed for murdering a mentally disabled child; accused boy's bizarre response to imperfect world becomes moral litmus test for adults, including a teacher (Don Cheadle) and teenager's dad (Kevin Spacey). Profanity, sexual language; teen drug use; implied sexual situations, one with teen and older woman; drinking, smoking. For high schoolers and older.
April 2, 2004
© 2004 The Washington Post Company ~
The Washington Times
Add 'Leland' to Spacey's losing streak
by Gary ArnoldAdd "The United States of Leland" to the recent string of Kevin Spacey bummers.
The work of a novice writer-director, Matthew Ryan Hoge, "Leland" is a half-baked, pseudo-profound tearjerker that reflects the suspicious influence of the last fashionable Spacey hit, the Oscar-winning "American Beauty." Also an overcalculated fable of disillusion and heartbreak in suburbia, "Leland" was co-produced by Mr. Spacey, who plays only a supporting role.
The downward-spiraling actor is Albert, a famous but haunted prestige novelist who has failed both as a spouse and as father of the felonious title character, Ryan Gosling as a Phoenix teenager who has committed a senseless murder. Mr. Hoge is vague about the circumstances until the denouement, rigged for a shock effect that merely confirms his morbid amateurism. He prefers recurrent hazy allusions long before clarifying precisely what transpired on the balmy afternoon Leland stabbed Ryan, the mentally retarded kid brother of a classmate, Becky Pollard (Jena Malone). To accentuate the inexplicable, Leland was accustomed to looking after his helpless victim; he had frequently walked Ryan home from school.
The pain Leland caused isn't nearly as conspicuous as the mystery surrounding his motives, whatever they were. This emphasis has the disgraceful effect of flattering Leland as some kind of very deep, though obviously mixed-up, specimen of contemporary youth. While in custody, he attends classes and attracts the curiosity of an opportunistic teacher called Pearl Madison (Don Cheadle), an aspiring writer who thinks that a best seller might be feasible if he can penetrate the kid's diffident facade and uncover those hidden sources of rage.
He could save himself a lot of trouble by cribbing from a long, shabby tradition of tabloid sob sisters, because nothing but platitudes lurk in the Leland psyche and case history. If anything, the scenario would be more promising as the blueprint for a parody of problem melodramas that patronize dysfunctional suburban characters.
"Leland" is a little more heartless than most, as smiling on a homicidal minor seems to preclude an adequate regard for the stricken members of the family he has victimized. Mr. Hoge simplifies his task by revealing that Becky is a precocious junkie, so devoted to the wretch who hooked her that she had no time to become fond of Leland. Her sister Julie (Michelle Williams) is preparing to break the heart of her boyfriend, Alan (Chris Klein), who has lived with the Pollards since losing his own folks.
Mr. Spacey's character, divorced years earlier from Leland's mother, Marybeth (Lena Olin), returns to Phoenix during the crisis. Curiously, he shares extended scenes only with Mr. Cheadle, in order to respond sarcastically to the intrusive flattery of this stranger with a disreputable writing agenda of his own.
Having made scant headway with the failed marriage of Leland's parents, Mr. Hoge invents a flashback in which the boy acquired a foster family in New York City during solitary Christmas vacations financed by Albert. That too proved a snare and delusion: Leland discovered that the idyllic domesticity of his surrogate parents was also perishable.
Disillusion a pensive boy this often and, obviously, he's going to murder someone out of the blue, reasoning that it's a mercy killing. Or so "The United States of Leland" appears to argue, in its belabored and dithering way. As a cautionary calamity, the plot pales in comparison with the movie itself. Mr. Hoge demonstrates how to make a sorry idea as stupefying and hateful as anyone could imagine. If you need pointers on miscalculating a feature debut, look no further.
April 2, 2004http://www.washtimes.com/entertainment/20040401-090733-7821r.htm
~
The New York Times
A Tale of Crime and Consequences
By A. O. SCOTT I know what they want from me," says Leland P. Fitzgerald (Ryan Gosling), reading from the notebook he keeps tucked in his orange detention-center jumpsuit. "They want a why." What he means is that "they" — the world, the residents of his tidy Arizona suburb, the perplexed viewers of "The United States of Leland" — want to know why this troubled young man fatally stabbed his former girlfriend's mentally handicapped brother.
The killing, at a park in broad daylight, is glimpsed at the beginning of Matthew Ryan Hoge's film, which opens today in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington. "Leland" unfolds in a now-familiar back-and-forth, chronologically fractured fashion, noting the consequences of Leland's crime and wondering about its causes.
The real question raised by "The United States of Leland" is not why, but how. How, that is, did so many talented actors find their way to this dreary and derivative study in suburban dysfunction?
Mr. Gosling, whose watchful, wounded intelligence and close-set eyes can remind you of a young Sean Penn, struggles to rescue Leland from the clutches of cliché, to keep him from becoming yet another disaffected child of affluence in the tradition of Holden Caulfield and Donnie Darko.
He is surrounded by an array of equally gifted actors — including Lena Olin, Chris Klein, Jena Malone and Kerry Washington — who find themselves in similar predicaments. Don Cheadle, as Pearl Madison, a would-be writer who is Leland's teacher at the detention center, gives a quiet, simmering performance that founders on the shoals of a screenplay that resembles an episode of "Dawson's Creek" written by the suburban neo-Gothic novelist A. M. Homes.
"Dawson's Creek" comes to mind not only because Michelle Williams, who played Jennifer in the show's later seasons, turns up as one of the dead boy's sisters, stuck in a cul-de-sac of a subplot, but also because the soundtrack is full of the kind of guitar-strumming, self-pitying pop songs that narcotized many a Wednesday evening on the WB network. The smooth, logy camera movements and buttery light give "Leland" an upscale made-for-television look, though its ambitions are decidedly literary. Leland's father is a famous novelist, played with weary sarcasm by Kevin Spacey, who is also one of the producers, and the film has the kind suffocating creative-writing-class humorlessness that is often mistaken for aching seriousness.
Leland, who is both acutely sensitive and detached from his feelings, believes he can perceive the deep sadness that lurks behind the placid surface of everyday life, a delusion Mr. Hoge seems to share. But Mr. Hoge, unable to give the rampant grief and frustration of his characters dramatic weight or narrative shape, tries to breathe meaning into their misery with self-consciously philosophical ruminations, which share space on the soundtrack with those mopey guitars. "Once something has happened, it can't unhappen," Leland tells Pearl, and after 104 incoherent minutes of "The United States of Leland," I had to concede that he was right.
"The United States of Leland" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for violence, profanity and drug use.
April 2, 2004
~
The Christian Science Monitor
by film critic David SterrittThis psychological mystery involves a murdered child, a troubled young man, and his father - a renowned but cantankerous author. The screenplay aims high in terms of humanity and complexity, but director Hoge drains it of energy with listless meanderings that provide more yawns than insights. 2 stars.
2 stars = Fair
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0402/p14s01-almo.html
April 2, 2004
~
Movie review: 'The United States of Leland'
By Robert K. Elder
Chicago Tribune Staff Writer
April 1, 2004
2 stars (out of 4)
"No man is an island," said 17th-century English author John Donne. But when we commit a crime so heinous, so senseless that it defies rationalization, we become one, completely isolated from humanity and its mainland moral structure.
In "The United States of Leland," writer/director Matthew Ryan Hoge explores the island nation of Leland P. Fitzgerald, a seemingly normal, bright high school kid who inexplicably stabs his ex-girlfriend's mentally handicapped brother to death.
"I think I made a mistake," Leland (Ryan Gosling) tells his mother (Lena Olin) when she discovers him at home, his hand wrapped in bandages.
In his thoughtfully paced, well-acted film, Hoge doesn't set out to solve the "why" of Leland's ghastly crime. He's more interested in examining the reason why society needs to create and interpret a reason for horror. Perhaps, Hoge seems to suggest, if we recognize it in others, we can keep our own capacity for evil in check.
Leland knows what the courts want from him: an explanation he doesn't have the introspective skills to provide. And vultures with angel wings circle.
Pearl (Don Cheadle), Leland's teacher in the detention facility where he awaits trial, sees the possibility of a book about Leland's crime. Leland's dad (Kevin Spacey, who also produced the film), a detached and abrasive novelist, doesn't visit his son but instead wanders through town, talking into a tape recorder when he's not climbing into a bottle. Both care for the boy and, paradoxically, want to exploit the tragedy.
The emotionally flat-lined Leland doesn't remember stabbing the boy, nor can he give any concrete reason for his actions. Hoge provides a few indicators: Leland was abandoned by his father and is crushed again when his junkie girlfriend, Becky (the fine but typecast Jena Malone), does the same. But that's not even a quarter of the story.
Slowly, Hoge pulls his mosaic together through a series of flashbacks and side stories, but he doesn't offer to interpret the whole picture. This is the film's strength. Among its weaknesses are an overpopulated cast and a disposable victim.
Cheadle and Gosling share most of the screen time, and the rest is divided among a few non-compelling subplots, with little time spent on the victim. He remains an abstraction, a fact with little flesh. We therefore don't experience the loss of his presence, the full horror of his death.
Hoge, however, tries to compensate through a series of handsome scenes hinged on painful, reality-conjuring detail (next to the murder scene, he pans to a broken candy necklace). The director also employs a clever visual motif, shifting camera angles from opposing right and left perspectives, mimicking his characters' quirk of looking at the world through one eye, then the other, then both.
While one angle reveals, the other obscures. But even with both eyes open, "The United States of Leland" eludes easy navigation.
~
The Village Voice
March 30, 2004Film: Tracking Shots
THE UNITED STATES OF LELAND
Written and directed by Matthew Ryan Hoge
Paramount Classics, opens April 2Hoge's wretched debut turns the murder of a retarded child into a wide-eyed meditation on "all the sadness" in the world—the victim is stabbed, but might just as well have been suffocated with the plastic bag from American Beauty. As Ryan Gosling's suburban teen killer scribbles pouty platitudes in his jailhouse journal, his a*****e literary-superstar father (Kevin Spacey), opportunistic would-be novelist prison teacher (Don Cheadle), and smacked-up girlfriend, who also happens to be the victim's sister (Jena Malone), sit around asking why. Trick question! Who needs reasons when you have juvenile existential pretensions? The movie's idiotic fascination with the senselessness of its central act is scarily close to a fetish. DENNIS LIM
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0413/tracking.php
© 2000 - 2004 Driving Mr. Spacey!
