The Vicious Kind and Pain -- Bad Title; Fine Film

I wasn't in the mood for moody, dark cinema the other evening when I started to watch a download of the 2008 indie film, "The Vicious Kind" but it turned out to be one of the most uplifting, meaningful, well made films I've seen in a long time, one of those that sets you up beautifully and then turns its world upside for you to question every previous assumption. 


Young, Writer-Director Lee Toland Krieger wowed the 2009 Sundance Festival with this tightly scripted, penetratingly directed gem, demonstrating a rising, uncanny talent. 

The film begins as a kind of noir, edgy, disturbing, taunt, almost Biblical set up -- in a small, Rhode Island country town, Thanksgiving visit, two brothers, a beautiful, bright, very young unsure college girlfriend brought home to meet dad, unwittingly stirring up, bitter, long-still smoldering, banked family ashes. 

The elder brother, Caleb, portrayed with uncompromising intensity by relatively unknown TV and film actor Alex Scott, chauffeurs his younger sibling and girlfriend back from their college to the hometown in his battered pickup truck to meet their father, from whom Caleb has been alienated for years even though the two live only two miles apart.

Worth sticking with,The Vicious Kind and Pain, pivots at about midway,  keeping its balance, true to its characters and realities, into a touching, loving, clear-eyed exploration of old family secrets, sins, pains, quirks and buried truths.

What are the right things, the wrong things one can't help, the most and least painful things, the most merciful 

lies and hurtful truths and the consequences of each? 

How does love remain standing while pulled by the 

inexorable gravity of the human heart and our erotic passions.

The most dislikible protagonist of the first 40 minutes

finely acted so that we truly hate the sonofabitch, turns 

out to be the deepest, most hurt, most conscionable, 

The innocent begin to grow up, played exquisitely by Brittany Snow ambivalently sweet, sensetive and smart draws us inside this girl's bewildered, then assertive, comprehending – and heartbroken – reality seamlessly as she discovers her womanly identity, power, contradictions, depth, along with growing pains.

Alex Frost plays the young innocent that Caleb tries misguidedly to protect from the risks of relationship refusing to allow himself to be embittered like is brother Caleb and his pilandering, sometimes embarrassing father played by the always engrossing character actor J.K. Simmons.

In the midst of a bewildering, painful family turn of events, examining my own foibles as a parent, wondering why, getting past it, moving on, but needing to understand, needing time, I could relate to this movie. 

It proved one of the little gems I found combing the DVD reviews, reading the collected film criticism at "www.rottentomatoes.com" and downloading only the four star picks that are of genres to which I'm partial...

I really wanted to be the movie reviewer at the L.A. Times, not so much feature writer, reporter and Sunday magazine editor. I should have stayed at UCLA and majored in film, like George Lucas and Francis Coppola back then...  

Success was sweet, but always seemed to distance me more and more from my hearts desires. That's life -- as 

John Lennon observed, "what happens while you're making other plans."

But then..

What are the right things to do in life, the wrong things.  the things one can't help, the most and least painful things, the most merciful lies and hurtful truths and the consequences of each? 

How does love remain standing while pulled by the 

inexorable gravity of the human heart and our erotic passions.

Predictably, everyone has turkey, but then surprises surface in the dark of night, skeletons come out of the closet and new light is cast upon old scars and by the time the kids take the train back to college, everything has changed. 

In between, each of four protagonists make you love, bristle and fear for them, and laugh in between.  I can't say more without being a spoiler.  Rent it, once your tummy settles down, it's a roller coaster ride -- brilliantly written, tight, no blockbuster, a European-style Indie cinema verite masterpiece, well directed. 

Bad title!  

The film caught me in the dumps in the aftermath of a saddening, hurtful misunderstanding involving one of my daughters.  I didn't need lessons in family pains.  But what had seemed depressing by the end proved uplifting and just what the doctor ordered.  Sofia's wisdom, or to some, the Holy Spirit and to others our better angels, often may seem to have abaondoned us, but what this film says is that they never stray far from our sides.