There's a scene midway through J A Bayona's new film A Monster Calls where a boy and his mum are curled up on the sofa watching a scratchy print of King Kong (1933) on his granddad's rediscovered 35mm projector. The mother falls asleep before the end and the little boy watches wide-eyed as the mighty Kong, swatting bi-planes on the Empire State Building and harassed to the point of exhaustion by the modern world, lets go and falls to his death.
'This is your imaginative inheritance', the filmmaker seems to say to him, 'and you're going to have to cope with it on your own, because the adults in your life are not awake to it'.
Conor O'Malley's mum is dying of cancer, and he's doing a lot of coping on his own. Bullied at school and worried about the future, he is surrounded by people who are struggling with the pace of change themselves but don't yet have the emotional vocabulary to really talk about it. At night he has regular anxiety dreams about a huge sink hole opening up beneath the church yard, threatening to swallow him and the entire world.
At first sight, A Monster Calls seems like it ought to belong in the Spielbergian storytelling tradition of lonely children who befriend mythical beings in order to come to terms with their life situation, except that there's something a lot deeper going on here. The spirit that is attracted to Conor's situation is a kind of volcanic yew tree and we implicitly understand it to be a metaphor for something ancient, something pre-Christian. Uprooting itself from the village cemetery, it tells Conor stories about a world where it was revered for its healing properties and when it roars with anger, it's often the fabric of the church that is physically undermined. Through the power of persuasive words, it initiates the repressed boy into a world of therapeutic expression of anger, smashing up the neatly ordered front room of his grandmother in a fit of uncontrollable rage, almost like Kong rampaging through the streets of New York. The uncomfortable object of the monster's morality is not destruction for it's own sake, but self knowledge, for Connor to discover and feel the root of his own anger and the unexpressed fears that feed it.
It's interesting to recall the heartbreaking moment at the end of Spielberg's ET (1982) where the Elliott's mother sees him interacting with the space alien, and is overcome with emotion at the realisation that her son has had to make friends with a creature from another world to find the love that he can't get at home. In A Monster Calls the mother goes on a very different emotional journey, reaching the point where she is able to say to Conor that it's ok to be angry, and that if he feels angry he should feel permission to break things and 'break them good'. In the final moments on her deathbed, when she finally sees Conor with the terrifyingly powerful, but now friendly eyed, monster through the haze of analgesic drugs, we realise that she and the spirit of volcanic anger are actually very well acquainted indeed.
'This is your imaginative inheritance', the filmmaker seems to say to him, 'and you're going to have to cope with it on your own, because the adults in your life are not awake to it'.
Conor O'Malley's mum is dying of cancer, and he's doing a lot of coping on his own. Bullied at school and worried about the future, he is surrounded by people who are struggling with the pace of change themselves but don't yet have the emotional vocabulary to really talk about it. At night he has regular anxiety dreams about a huge sink hole opening up beneath the church yard, threatening to swallow him and the entire world.
At first sight, A Monster Calls seems like it ought to belong in the Spielbergian storytelling tradition of lonely children who befriend mythical beings in order to come to terms with their life situation, except that there's something a lot deeper going on here. The spirit that is attracted to Conor's situation is a kind of volcanic yew tree and we implicitly understand it to be a metaphor for something ancient, something pre-Christian. Uprooting itself from the village cemetery, it tells Conor stories about a world where it was revered for its healing properties and when it roars with anger, it's often the fabric of the church that is physically undermined. Through the power of persuasive words, it initiates the repressed boy into a world of therapeutic expression of anger, smashing up the neatly ordered front room of his grandmother in a fit of uncontrollable rage, almost like Kong rampaging through the streets of New York. The uncomfortable object of the monster's morality is not destruction for it's own sake, but self knowledge, for Connor to discover and feel the root of his own anger and the unexpressed fears that feed it.
It's interesting to recall the heartbreaking moment at the end of Spielberg's ET (1982) where the Elliott's mother sees him interacting with the space alien, and is overcome with emotion at the realisation that her son has had to make friends with a creature from another world to find the love that he can't get at home. In A Monster Calls the mother goes on a very different emotional journey, reaching the point where she is able to say to Conor that it's ok to be angry, and that if he feels angry he should feel permission to break things and 'break them good'. In the final moments on her deathbed, when she finally sees Conor with the terrifyingly powerful, but now friendly eyed, monster through the haze of analgesic drugs, we realise that she and the spirit of volcanic anger are actually very well acquainted indeed.
-o-
Although this is a great film about feeling unprepared for a world of very adult emotions, don't be misled by the format into assuming it will be suitable for all children. There were some heaving sobs from younger members in the audience at the screening that I saw and I hoped that the adults who were with them were prepared for some very open hearted conversations later. This is a film that shuns the sacharrin ending we are primed to expect in favour of lovingly initiating us into the harsh mysteries of loss and grief in the only way it can.
As I left the cinema on New Year's Day, I saw glimpses of the trailers for forthcoming films on the foyer screens, which usually profoundly dishearten me. I reflected on the inevitable scenes of apocalyptic destruction and superheroes smashing up major western cities because of their idealogical differences. It struck me then that these directors, who were surely dynamic, creative people, were perhaps angry citzens too. These filmmakers and their audiences - it seemed to me that they were dreaming their own dreams of 'breaking things good', just like we did in the 1930s.
Unlike King Kong however, A Monster Calls is a film that advocates primal emotions being integrated, not indulged, sacrificed, or repressed, and it made me feel strangely hopeful for the first time in a long, long while.
No comments:
Post a Comment