What it feels like for a boy
Agroup of 14-year-old boys, baby-faced and raging
with hormones, sit around a Long Island pizza shop and
talk about sex. One of the kids has been sleeping with
his sister -- or so he claims -- but doesn't realize
she can get pregnant when he neglects to use a condom.
Another boy, Gary (Billy Kay), tattooed and pierced,
works as a road-side rent boy, but keeps his mouth
shut about it. Howie (Paul Franklin Dano), the
youngest looking of the bunch and not yet fully
ravaged by puberty, has the sophisticated cynicism of
a boy who hasn't had his sexual awakening yet. The
dishonesty, unspoken truth, and ambiguity of this
early scene exemplify the observant strengths of
L.I.E. (the double-meaning acronym for the Long
Island Expressway), yet another earnest,
controversial, indie teen film.
Compulsive hooky players, these boys have a bad habit
of breaking into oversized houses in the neighborhood,
looking for petty cash and jewelry. They seem to steal
out of boredom as much as for the booty. Invariably
setting off the alarms, they sprint away, and the
heist becomes a game. (In one moment of ballsy
fabulousness, Gary struts home from a robbery wearing
a stolen fur coat.) Soon, an affinity forms between
Gary and Howie, on both criminal and intimate levels.
Gary lets Howie in on a big score, breaking in to the
house of one of his most faithful clients, Big John
(Brian Cox, Rushmore, Manhunter). Big
John is celebrating his birthday in the house when the
boys break in, and despite the singing upstairs, they
make enough noise to be nearly caught fleeing the
scene. They do, however, manage to swipe John's prized
(and unsubtly symbolic) pistols before making their
getaway.
The next day, the boys do boyish things, playing with
the guns and wrestling, pausing in their roughhousing
just long enough to look longingly in each other's
eyes. Unlike such moments in typical coming out films,
however, here the boys don't kiss. They don't make any
overwritten speeches or even verbally acknowledge
their mutual desire; they don't have to. These boys,
quite realistically, refuse to identify and let the
moment pass, the way most such moments would in real
life. Just when it seems Gary might kiss Howie, he
threatens to soak him with a loogie instead.
Too soon, though, L.I.E. changes lanes, and the
focus shifts from the relationship between Howie and
Gary to the development of one between Howie and Big
John. To save himself, Gary rats on Howie to Big John,
who pursues the boy and gives him a provocative
lecture on the fine art of oral sex. Big John, in no
uncertain terms, has pedophilic proclivities and hires
young boys, including Gary, to fulfill them. In his
performance, Cox resists making a grotesque or
pathetic character out of Big John, but director
Michael Cuesta is not so sympathetic. Horror or
suspense camera set-ups -- including a stalking point
of view shot when Big John is walking behind Howie and
a scene when his orange car ominously pulls up behind
the unsuspecting boy -- code him as a threatening
chickenhawk.
And yet, Big John becomes Howie's caretaker rather
than lover, when Howie's father gets sent to federal
prison in the film's tedious subplot. Troubled
parental relations run throughout the film -- Howie's
mother is dead and his neglectful father is sent to
federal prison, Big John's father is absent and his
mother is overly attentive. Such cliches reinforce the
old assumption that homosexuality results from bad
nurturing.
Making matters more muddled, Big John identifies as a
straight man who likes little boys. "It's confusing,"
he tells Howie, and it certainly is. Howie, seemingly
caught between his need for an alpha male in his life
and his burgeoning queer sex drive, makes a pass at
Big John, who refuses Howie's advances. This sudden
change of character -- from seducer to concerned
father -- not only avoids disconcerting narrative
developments already set in motion, but also seems too
conventionally moralistic in a film that looks at
first like it will sensitively and boldly address a
pedophilic gay relationship. Both Roeland Kerbosch's
For a Lost Soldier and Todd Solondz's
Happiness approach such non-normative
relationships and desires with considerably less
anxiety. Granted, these desires can be conflicted and
perplexing, but the representation here reads as a
failure of nerve, a refusal to take on an
uncomfortable topic, one that is so often
sensationalized or ignored and so is in special need
of intelligent treatment.
Without the kiddie-porn-sleaze factor of Larry Clark's
Kids, Cuesta's film does succeed in presenting underdeveloped, not-yet-legal teen flesh in a clearly eroticized manner and
acknowledges the boys' erotic yearnings. (Thanks to
the MPAA, L.I.E. does share Kids's NC-17
rating.) Howie masturbates in bed, and Gary, clearly
seeing himself as a beefcake even though his body has
not caught up with his self-image, takes his shirt off
at every opportunity.
L.I.E. is most effective when focused on the
emotional and social edge walked by these boys, who
talk about fucking but either don't know what they're
talking about (one delivers a particularly comic
mispronunciation of "clit") or cannot articulate their
desires. It also reveals a suburban underworld of
hustling (and an intriguing, cloudy reference to a cop
who may be a john as well), without sensationalizing
or exploiting the boys. Its ultimate refusal to go all
the way, however, brings the film to a dead end.
