Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

Movie Guru Rating:
Meditative (3 out of 5)

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The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is one more coming-of-age tale—with cartoons

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

To answer the obvious question: No. Despite a title that seems ripped from the headlines, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys has nothing to do with the Catholic Church's ongoing problems with child-stalking priests. That's a relief, of sorts—no film adaptation is likely to match the searing first-person accounts that have been all over the news lately, and anyway who really wants to see that?

Really, the mild blasphemy of Dangerous Lives, a first feature from director Peter Care, would prob-ably seem refreshingly archaic to church leaders. Its depiction of a Catholic school overseen by a stern, humorless nun (Jodie Foster) and a clueless, chain-smoking priest (Vincent D'Onofrio) is almost nostalgic in the current context. Remember when you thought the worst thing a man or woman of the cloth would do was rap your knuckles?

The film is a coming-of-age story, with all the things that phrase typically connotes: juvenile mischief, a little bit of drugs and booze, the awkward first kiss, and the inevitable contemplations of sex, the opposite gender, individuality and, eventually, death. Care handles all of it with a fair amount of style, but not much about the movie feels either fresh or revel-atory. The only unusual element is the periodic interjection of animated fantasy sequences, done in the style of superhero cartoons by cult favorite comic book artist Todd McFarlane.

Set in the 1970s and based on a book of the same name by the late Chris Fuhrman, the film is about a teenage boy, Francis (Emile Hirsch), and his relationships with his troubled best friend Tim (Kieran Culkin, easily the standout in the cast) and a girl in their class, Margie (Jena Malone, who also played the object of desire in the far superior Donnie Darko). Francis and Tim are the leaders of a quartet of Catholic school misfits, comic-book fanatics who spend most of their afternoons drinking beer in an abandoned warehouse and making up superhero stories about themselves. The most common object of their enmity is Foster's Sister Assumpta, a thin-lipped prude who clumps down the aisle of their classroom on a wooden leg and is constantly punishing the boys for their transgressions—for the good of their souls, she explains. She's so uptight she even reprimands them for reading William Blake ("a very dangerous thinker," she says, in a nervous and unpersuasive Irish trill). In the boys' fantasies, as animated by McFarlane, Sister Assumpta becomes Peg-Leg, leader of a demonic gang of biker nuns.

At first, the film proceeds along familiar but pleasant lines. The boys' group dynamics are well drawn, especially the friendship of Francis and Tim. Francis is the dreamy but smart one, and Tim is the daredevil; they feed off each other's strengths. When Francis starts pursuing Margie (at Tim's urging), his inarticulate embarrassment and her carefully calibrated responses are acutely adolescent.

But somewhere along the line, the movie jumps the rails. Both Tim and Margie turn out to be far more disturbed than Francis realizes, and a couple of plot twists force the story in awkward directions. There is supposed to be a larger framework for all of it—Francis' various experiences lead him to confront issues of sin, guilt, redemption and forgiveness. The moral conflicts never really gel, though, because the narrative is unfocused and increasingly implausible.

There is also the matter of the animated sequences. At first, they're funny enough, both as a satire of the whole superhero shtick and as a dramatization of teen self-mythologizing. But they pile up over the course of the movie. By the third or fourth episode, they seem repetitious and limiting, not much more interesting in concept or execution than real superhero cartoons. McFarlane probably wasn't the best choice for the project; as creator of the Spawn comic and TV series, he may not have sufficient critical distance from the genre.

The most curious thing about it all is the presence of Foster. She is one of the executive producers, and her name is clearly intended as a box office draw, so you can only assume she was passionate about the movie. But it's hard to tell why. It certainly wasn't the appeal of her own character, who never evolves beyond basic nun stereotypes. Foster herself has trouble buying into Sister Assumpta's naive righteousness; half the time she seems to be suppressing a giggle. Likewise, the generally talented D'Onofrio wanders through his underwritten role without a clear sense of purpose.

The movie as a whole suffers from the same affliction. Without much new to say about adolescence, the church, comic books or even the 1970s (the period gestures in the wardrobes, haircuts and soundtrack are all predictable), it plays like a room-temperature remake of The Ice Storm. If our rating system allowed for half-gurus, this film would fall right in the middle of the scale—it does what it does without much fizz or fuss. But since I was taught to round up, I'll give it a three, mostly for Culkin's irrepressible smirk.