Film Review: Gardens of the NightTom Arnold delivers a persuasive performance as a “nice guy” who is at base a sleazy child predator.Nov 4, 2008, 05:08 PM ET
Prostitution below the legal age may be common in the
underdeveloped world, where selling one’s young body is often the
only way to survive other than by working for a dollar a day in a
sneaker factory. But forced prostitution of tykes has got to be
about the sleaziest crime one can engage in. Such a case is brought
to light in writer-director Damian Harris’s Gardens of the
Night, the title of which is taken from a poem, the action
opening in a clean, solid, middle-class area somewhere on the East
Coast.
Harris uses a pair of actors to play the leads at the age of eight, then a separate couple at seventeen. His point is that not only is pimping out a kid horrendous enough, a complete destruction of innocence, but the abused kids ultimately turn into adults with disassociated identities—with blank looks on their faces, and no foundation for emotional giving and taking. Gardens of the Night features some fine acting, particularly by Ryan Simpkins as eight-year-old victim Leslie. To achieve her performance, the director did not tell her what the story was really about, but instead described the character as the object of someone who wants a family of his own. Tom Arnold, already cast as a man who has been raping his daughter in Marianna Palka’s quirky romance Good Dick, now plays the part of the abductor, Alex, with such empathy for his victim that we in the audience can almost think that what he is doing is not quite as terrible as the media always says. After Alex tricks Leslie into entering his car, the young girl meets another victim her age, Donnie (Jermaine “Scooter” Smith), who could easily escape but is convinced that his mother has voluntarily given him up to Alex. Leslie protects herself from the strangeness of the situation by reading fairy-tales about a forest into which young people can escape to feel safe. At midpoint, the action shifts to San Diego nine years later, where the older Leslie (Gillian Jacobs) and Donnie (Evan Ross) sell their bodies to passersby. The now beautiful Leslie even recruits younger girls into the trade, though she is given another chance for redemption when she is accepted by Michael (John Malkovich) into a women’s shelter pending her release to her parents—whom Leslie believes to be dead. Gardens of the Night could be called a docudrama, but it is filmed by cinematographer Paula Huidobro in both the dingy world of predators and the middle-class suburbs of Leslie’s parents as though it were imaginative fiction. We come away with an understanding of what these victims go through in a movie that answers the question, “Why don’t they just run away or call 911?” What happens to Leslie and the one person in her sordid life who cares for her convinces us that while we may think these people would love to kill their abductors, they instead have absorbed their values. Film Review: Gardens of the NightTom Arnold delivers a persuasive performance as a “nice guy” who is at base a sleazy child predator.Nov 4, 2008, 05:08 PM ET
Prostitution below the legal age may be common in the underdeveloped world, where selling one’s young body is often the only way to survive other than by working for a dollar a day in a sneaker factory. But forced prostitution of tykes has got to be about the sleaziest crime one can engage in. Such a case is brought to light in writer-director Damian Harris’s Gardens of the Night, the title of which is taken from a poem, the action opening in a clean, solid, middle-class area somewhere on the East Coast.
Harris uses a pair of actors to play the leads at the age of eight, then a separate couple at seventeen. His point is that not only is pimping out a kid horrendous enough, a complete destruction of innocence, but the abused kids ultimately turn into adults with disassociated identities—with blank looks on their faces, and no foundation for emotional giving and taking. Gardens of the Night features some fine acting, particularly by Ryan Simpkins as eight-year-old victim Leslie. To achieve her performance, the director did not tell her what the story was really about, but instead described the character as the object of someone who wants a family of his own. Tom Arnold, already cast as a man who has been raping his daughter in Marianna Palka’s quirky romance Good Dick, now plays the part of the abductor, Alex, with such empathy for his victim that we in the audience can almost think that what he is doing is not quite as terrible as the media always says. After Alex tricks Leslie into entering his car, the young girl meets another victim her age, Donnie (Jermaine “Scooter” Smith), who could easily escape but is convinced that his mother has voluntarily given him up to Alex. Leslie protects herself from the strangeness of the situation by reading fairy-tales about a forest into which young people can escape to feel safe. At midpoint, the action shifts to San Diego nine years later, where the older Leslie (Gillian Jacobs) and Donnie (Evan Ross) sell their bodies to passersby. The now beautiful Leslie even recruits younger girls into the trade, though she is given another chance for redemption when she is accepted by Michael (John Malkovich) into a women’s shelter pending her release to her parents—whom Leslie believes to be dead. Gardens of the Night could be called a docudrama, but it is filmed by cinematographer Paula Huidobro in both the dingy world of predators and the middle-class suburbs of Leslie’s parents as though it were imaginative fiction. We come away with an understanding of what these victims go through in a movie that answers the question, “Why don’t they just run away or call 911?” What happens to Leslie and the one person in her sordid life who cares for her convinces us that while we may think these people would love to kill their abductors, they instead have absorbed their values.
|
||||
|
|
Get Box Office Alerts via Mobile
FREE Newsletters
Share on LinkedIn
|
||||||||
