Miss Cleo’s Picks: The Only Living Boy in New York

Man, I needed this one.

The forces of the universe collided this X-Mas to provide me with a fairly shit day.  It happens.  Not every holiday can be a holly-jolly one, y’know, no matter how much we may say to the contrary.

So I proceeded to light my new candle and grabbed a bottle of 2016 Gabbiano Chianti, both welcome gifts from everyone’s favorite fiery seer, Miss Cleo.

That’s the stuff…

Sure, this us usually my setup for horror flicks (gotta have ambiance, yo!), but any port in a storm, ya dig?  With the atmosphere thusly set, I tuned in to a film Miss Cleo brought to my attention way back in July: The Only Living Boy in New York.

The plot (and technically the title…twice…) centers on Thomas, the son of a wealthy publisher and an artist.  Now, Thomas has some brains, but he lacks any biting ambition, save staying out of his father’s illustrious shadow.  He has a thing for his friend, Mimi (I swear the first few times he said her name it sounded like “maybe” with a bit of a mid-Atlantic affectation), but she’s not feeling him that way.  You can just feel the angst, can’t you?  Life is just sliding by for Thomas until he serendipitously espies his father on a date with another woman, played by Kate Beckinsale.  (Did you catch the play on words there?)  Taking a slightly unorthodox approach to things, partially due to this influence of his nosy-seeming new neighbor, he decides to confront her, rather than his philandering father, but, surprising to pretty much anybody with a logical brain, this leads to an affair between them.  As things progress, Thomas has to decide how to juggle the various influences and desires in his life, and it ain’t easy.

Yup.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this film, really.  Marc Webb, who brought us Gifted earlier this year and (500) Days of Summer a few years ago, continues to show his skill here.  Aiding him are Jeff Bridges, Pierce Brosnan, Cynthia Nixon, and Kiersey Clemons, who do rather well here.  But some things nag at me even now, especially the underuse of certain smaller-role actors, especially the always-awesome Debi Mazar, who I’m struggling to remember even speaking, and The Princess Bride‘s own Wallace Shawn, who’s only in a scene or two.  It’s just odd.

Even stranger is the slightly twisty story itself, which bafflingly layers the affairs for no sane reason, and the repartee between Beckinsale and Callum Turner (more on his Thomas momentarily) is shockingly forced, unnatural, and downright weird.  From the get-go, she’s apparently trying to seduce him, or, at the very least, egging him on to make a move on her.  It comes out of nowhere and just comes across as wrong on a number of levels.  Don’t get me wrong, Beckinsale’s still got it going on, especially since they let her keep her accent (albeit slightly altered, I think), but there’s no reason for her to act the way she does beyond the script telling her to.

Which brings me to one of the weakest elements of the whole production: the script.  Writer Allan Loeb has punished us over the years with such gems as The Space between Us, The Switch, Collateral Beauty, So Undercover, Just Go with It, Rock of Ages, and that crappy Wall Street sequel a while back.  That’s quite the rap sheet, and there’s even more to be mined.  He seems like he’s trying here, though, but he just doesn’t have the skill to pull things off.  Nearly none of the central characters are given much in the way of likability, save Nixon, who doesn’t have much to do, and Bridges, who’s given possibly too much to do.  Beyond that, the central conflict, the affairs, is created in a sort of soap opera-esque manner, in that people say strange things and do out-of-character things (or things that make their characters look distorted to anyone with a passing knowledge of how humans work).  This could work in different hands, or in a different setting, but here it’s very much out of place.  Palpably so throughout.

Making things worse is Thomas himself.  Apparently I’ve seen Callum Turner a few times (in Green Room, Assassin’s Creed, and Victor Frankenstein), but I just plain do not remember him at all.  He has very little screen presence, it would seem.  Here, he’s tasked unenviously with portraying a stereotypical aimless drifter of a Millennial, complete with head-up-his-ass mindsets and a general distaste for normalcy, stability, or goodness.  He’s self-absorbed to a T, emotionally manipulative, borderline sociopathic, and kinda dickish to pretty much everyone, including the people he purports to like/love.  Somehow, according to Loeb’s script, we’re supposed to root for him as he comes of age (I think that’s what’s happening here) and be happy for him in the end.  Nothin’ doin’.  I wanted to punch this kid most of the times his jaws flapped.  He’s everything wrong with the younger generations in the eyes of the older ones, and he sure comes across that way, in the most hackneyed manner possible.  How anyone could consider this a good idea for a protagonist is beyond me.  I’m not even sure he truly learns anything by the end, he just isn’t as aimless.  Or something.  It was tough to care by that point, lemme tell ya.

That being said, the film as a whole isn’t the slog it’s likely sounded like up to this point.  I credit this mostly to the cast and to Webb’s ability to keep things moving along.  I actually felt for Clemons’s Mimi at times, mostly ’cause she was stuck hanging around with the massive bellend that is Thomas, and Nixon threatened at times to actually do something with her barely-formed character, and they helped me through several scenes I would have otherwise completely written off.  I started off digging Bridges, but once his true purpose is made known, I was immediately turned off.  Still, despite every roadblock thrown in my way, I wanted to see how things played out, even if it mostly ended in general bemusement and disappointment.

Overall, this was a bit of a miss in my eyes.  Perhaps with a better script and a slightly altered perspective it could have worked, but as is, it just malingered on the screen.

Maybe it was the wine (which, for those so inclined, is a solid and enjoyable red, one that doesn’t overdo things in any way, but certainly makes sure you know it’s there), maybe the pleasant aroma of mulled apple cider spices filling my room, I dunno, but by the end of the evening, despite not being too enthused about the film, I was somehow left with a positive feeling.  Somehow, against the odds, I had felt the warmth of the X-Mas season.

So, fear not, Miss Cleo, the film may not have been the usual success, but the overall experience wound up filling in the cracks.

Cheers, kids.