Terri (Tuesday, June 28, 2011) (47)

Azazel Jacob's first major(ish) film was Mama's Man in 2008, an interesting atmosphere piece, in a style that is rather a corollary to mumblecore (mumbleish you could say). It is very rough around the edges (on purpose) and tells the very sad story of a man in a sort of mid-life crisis, moving back to his parents' small apartment and regressing to adolescence while avoiding his own wife and family across the country. I found the film interesting from a style point of view, but ultimately difficult to watch and impossible to connect to because the story never really moved much.

Jacob's newest film, Terri, is a vast improvement on that first work. He maintains the interesting scruffy style of the first, but gives it just enough story (though still not very much) to move our emotions and sympathies. It's a good movie, much better than most, but is still stuck in such a weird place that it's hard to work around a few elemental parts of it.

The film opens with Terri (Jacob Wysocki), an obese giant of a teenager sitting naked in the bathtub of his uncle's house where he lives. This is a terrible, dirty, messy house in the Valley and Uncle James (Creed Bratton... Creed from The Office) is a 50-something man suffering from dementia who is highly medicated and not much of a caregiver to Terri. Terri walks to school through the woods, is laughed at by all the kids he sees on the soccer filed, is called terrible names (one kid calls him "garbage dump") and gets mocked in class with the tacit approval of the teachers who don't seem to care about much of anything.

One day he's ordered to the office of the assistant principal, Mr. Fitzgerald (John C. Reilly), who tells him they can have a weekly meeting to talk about stuff and help him out. Mr. Fitzgerald says he was a freak as a kid too and that kids laughed at him, but he survived and can help Terri get through it. Terri seems to get along fine (though he's very sad) but he accepts the offer and they two start an interesting, funny relationship that helps to give Terri a boost of self-confidence.

What is hardest for me about this film is that there seem to be two separate tracks of the story that exist simultaneously and never totally get resolved or bump into one another. That is, Terri's home life with his uncle is incredibly sad (and by incredibly say, I mean really, really, really sad) while the relationship at school with Mr. Fitzgerald is sorta goofy funny (as John C. Reilly does very well). I really enjoy both parts independently, but they don't meld well and never really feel like they fit in the same film. I should also say that although they're both done well, neither one is particularly fresh; the home stuff feels very much like the recent trend in movies for showing the "shitiness" of life (see: Hesher, Super, Observe and Report) and the school stuff is very much like the gonzo, biting comedies that have become rather fashionable (see: East Bound and Down, Win Win, Cyrus... in fact Reilly's character here could be the same guy as in Cyrus).

But Jacobs does have a good eye for the look of the film and a good sensibility for actors. There is a scene near the end of the film where Terri and some new friends "experiment" with whiskey and his uncle's pills. I have to say I have possibly never seen a more realistic-feeling drunk/drug scene, let alone one with young actors who probably have little experience with such vices themselves. It's a great job on the actors' parts and a great job of direction. Wysocki is really great throughout, never mugging for the camera, always maintaining a proud exterior even when he's crumbling inside. He really seems like a kid from next door. I think it's a pretty difficult performance, because one's instinct would be to go very hammy and play up the fat thing, but Wysocki avoids that and goes quiet and natural. His performance is largely heartbreaking and very easy to identify with (as I was a ridiculed, misfit kid in high school with a fresh mouth who was mocked by classmates and never defended by teachers).

There is a nice scene in the middle where Mr. Fitzgerald tells Terri that life is generally rotten and that we are all here just trying to "get by". He says that people are shity and make mistakes, but that you have to ignore most of that and just keep living. Although perhaps heavy handed, this dialogue sums up the story and structure of the film. There's no real resolution; it's just about a few weeks in a weird kid's life. He will survive high school (we all did... barely) and keep moving along. He makes mistakes and pays the prices, and then has some small successes. It's a very sweet movie.

Stars: 3 of 4