MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Mysterious Skin Review
Spotted in Monterey County Herald by way of the Washington Post and others:
'Skin' deep
Indie filmmaker Gregg Araki comes of age with fascinating, disturbing 'Mysterious Skin'
By DESSON THOMSON
The Washington Post
Mysterious Skin" is a helter-skelter ride of the soul, an unblinking, white-knuckle crash landing into the mushy mysteries of the subconscious.
Gregg Araki's movie, which makes an ingenious, dark metaphor out of extraterrestrial visitation, is not for the fainthearted, the squeamish or the inflexibly decent.
It plunges headlong and unequivocally into themes of pedophilia, prostitution, rape and I haven't even mentioned alien probing.
While watching this movie, I scribbled the word "whoa" five times into my notebook.
Two young men, in voice-over, recount their traumatic stories, side by side, as it were.
One is 18-year-old Brian Lackey (Brady Corbet), who has no conscious explanation for two blackout experiences in his childhood, one of which has caused him to have spontaneous nosebleeds when he's under stress.
He has also suffered nightmares and wet beds. In his teen years, he sees a television show about alien abductions and comes to believe he may have been the victim of an encounter himself.
He contacts one of the women interviewed on the show and discovers she shares many of his experiences.
The other storyteller is Neil McCormick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a gay hustler in his late teens, whose formative sexual experiences consisted of pleasuring himself at the age of 8, while watching his promiscuous mother (Elisabeth Shue) in an intimate encounter.
At the same tender age, he also had consensual (according to him) sex with his male baseball coach Heider (Bill Sage).
Sick of the two-bit transactions he's having in his Kansas home town, he moves to New York City. But his risky behavior there sets him up for almost certain disaster.
"Where people have a heart," observes Neil's best friend, Wendy (Michelle Trachtenberg), "Neil McCormick has a bottomless black hole."
Why these two men's histories are in the same drama becomes apparent later.
But until that time, we watch -- fascinated, appalled and powerfully moved -- as they recount whole lives spent in a downward spiral.
Brian is so traumatized he has been unable to enjoy any kind of intimacy, but Neil, who believes he feels a liberated awakening about his sexuality, walks without hesitation toward sexual self-obliteration.
Each story oddly complements and fortifies the other, in terms of gearing up the dread, the desperation and the suspense.
And when they converge, the boys' fusion of anger, bitterness, regret and revelation is mesmeric.
If you have thrived from your experiences with any combination of filmmakers David Lynch, Todd Solondz, David Cronenberg and Larry Clark, you might be prime audience material for this film.
And yet, Araki, who made such thematically intense and sexually graphic films as "The Living End," "Totally Fed Up" and "The Doom Generation," ratchets things even more acutely than those directors.
But he does it with silky, inspired skill. Despite the hard-edged, controversial subject matter, he makes you view the taboo from another perspective.
In those moments, you at least temporarily reconsider your paradigm for morality.
When Coach Heider seduces the boy, yes, it is pedophilia and a deeply immoral offense.
But in the context of Araki's film, something else is happening. The 8-year-old Neil, who has a big crush on his coach, has partly engineered this seduction, and he's perhaps even more lost in the passionate moment than Heider.
But whether Neil really had the halcyon experience he thought he did becomes a later matter.
Corbet is note perfect as the crushed, anguished Brian, who's determined to understand what has happened to him; and Gordon-Levitt's harrowing turn as Neil surely marks him for even greater roles ahead.
There's something extraordinarily tender about him as he takes you through his personal nightmare. (He has come a long way since playing Tommy Solomon in TV's "3rd Rock From the Sun.")
Their performances are so vital for the dangerous brinkmanship of this movie.
And behind the camera, Araki is the steadying force, hands firmly on the wheel of this bucking, swerving vehicle.
His unblinking conviction makes this movie, at least by its own standards, a disturbing triumph.GO!
'MYSTERIOUS SKIN' (Unrated, 99 minutes) -- Contains intense thematic material, pedophilia, violence, rape, obscenity and sexual scenes
Taut 'Skin' is brutal yet brilliant
'Skin' is both touching, unnerving
BY WESLEY MORRIS
The Boston Globe
The two Kansas boys who undergo a traumatizing sexual experience in the haunting new movie "Mysterious Skin" grow into young men troubled in radically different ways.
Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) becomes a gay hustler, a feral viper whose innocent eyes and drawn, boyish face suggest that his viciousness is just a pose.
But it's impenetrable all the same: He's equipped to hurt people.
Brian (Brady Corbett) turns asexual and reroutes his psychic disfigurement into a geeky, almost religious obsession with extraterrestrials.
He believes he was abducted by aliens and spends the movie trying to uncover the nature of the abduction.
His search leads him to another alleged abductee, played poignantly by Mary Lynn Rajskub, and eventually back to Neil, his Little League teammate all those years ago.
Set mostly in the late 1980s, "Mysterious Skin" traverses a pulpy, punky landscape of ache and rage.
The catalyst for that pain is the man who molested the boys, generically but indelibly called Coach -- played with surpassing tenderness by Bill Sage, who here sports a killer Mark Spitz mustache.
The scenes of the crime are discreetly, tastefully, almost lovingly filmed, mostly from the man's perspective. (It's one of the movie's more audacious suggestions that the teenage Neil is loveless because Coach stole both his innocence and his heart.)
Director Gregg Araki adapted "Mysterious Skin" from the evocative 1995 novel by Scott Heim.
The book worked hard to keep Brian's memory of what happened to him suspensefully opaque, while Araki focuses more on illustrating the evolution of Neil and Brian.
But more significantly, Heim's book has given Araki's filmmaking a new sense of narrative purpose.
The film is actually a major artistic breakthrough for Araki, a onetime bad boy of independent filmmaking.
Its psychological intelligence, attention to emotional currents, and humanity are surprises.
Could this be the same man who created the hateful wasteland known as "The Living End"? That movie was a long time ago (1992), and so were his others, including "The Doom Generation" and "Splendor," sensationalist films that sullied American art houses in the 1990s.
Araki's attraction to the danger in Heim's novel makes sense. The director used to be among a group of troublemaking gay directors (including Todd Haynes) who used controversy to combat artistic complacency.
Haynes evolved into "Safe" and "Far From Heaven." Araki long remained stuck in nihilistic petulance.
He's 45 now, and "Mysterious Skin" is his first movie of this millennium.
The usual Araki elements are here (hustlers, rebels, uproar, the absurd), but now he appears to be working with focus and compassion.
His movie is sensual and comic, bizarre and piercing, brutal and otherworldly, like Pedro Almodovar dreaming in the key of Gus Van Sant.
Araki has never been an actor's director (he rarely hires trained ones), but the performances here are generally strong (an exception is Michelle Trachtenberg, sadly miscast as Neil's artist-freak best friend).
Corbett does deceptively smart work as Brian, who is closed-off, weird, and remote in just the way you'd expect someone preoccupied with aliens to be.
Because Levitt is so volcanic, it's easy to overlook Corbett's sensitive work.
And Levitt, a long way from "Third Rock From the Sun," is very good in a part that calls for truculence and sorrow.
When the film goes violently bleak toward the end, Levitt follows, body and soul.
He shows us Neil's aching spirit, letting out a great, primal howl at one point that could have come from James Dean.
It's a shout that can't be lost on Araki. The rebel has finally found his cause.GO!
Mysterious Skin
Directed by: Gregg Araki
Written by: Araki, adapted from the novel by Scott Heim
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbett, Bill Sage, Elisabeth Shue, Michelle Trachtenberg, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Jeff Licon
Running time: 99 minutes
Rated: NC-17 (Language, scenes of simulated sex, and one sequence of child molestation)
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorrisglobe.com.
'Mysterious Skin,' deft and haunting
By ANN HORNADAY
The Washington Post
Of all the representations of pedophilia in movies recently, from "Mystic River" to Kevin Bacon's powerful performance as a recovering abuser in "The Woodsman" to Todd Solondz's treatment of the subject in the unsettling, if condescending, "Palindromes," "Mysterious Skin" might be the most unflinching depiction of how sexual predation reverberates over time, like toxic ripples through a pond.
In this sad, often unnervingly graphic adaptation of the acclaimed novel by Scott Heim, former child TV star Joseph Gordon-Levitt ("3rd Rock From the Sun") delivers a haunting, uncompromising performance as Neil McCormick, a young man who at 8 was seduced by his Little League coach.
Now a gay hustler cruising for tricks in his tiny home town in Kansas, Neil has the half-lidded, sneering gaze of a teen-ager who has embraced nihilism, not as a fashion statement but as a survival mechanism.
He's shut off and shut down, careering down a frightening path of unsafe sex and increasingly violent encounters that seem to be leading inexorably to his self-destruction.
Meanwhile Brian Lackey (Brady Corbet) is heading down his own path, searching for answers to the pivotal episode in his young life, when he witnessed a UFO landing and was abducted by aliens.
Narrated by both characters as young men, "Mysterious Skin" traces how their lives intersected as kids, and what led to the mysteries they're living with as adults.
Director Gregg Araki, until now best known for such transgressive gay-themed underground films as "The Doom Generation" and "Nowhere," has made the most mature movie of his career, one that deftly cuts not only between the stories of these wildly different young men, but also between past and present within those stories.
Capturing 1980s suburban ennui just as vividly as early-'90s New York, Araki suffuses both worlds with a dreamlike quality, one that at times threatens to make "Mysterious Skin" more like a parable than realistic drama.
Similarly, its characters often speak in improbably well-turned phrases that seem more literary than lived. (For some reason, the plummiest lines are given to the film's two female leads -- Elisabeth Shue, who plays Neil's blowzily unaware mother, and Michelle Trachtenberg as his bad-girl best friend.)
Still, for its occasional ponderousness, there is a terrible, terrifying honesty at the core of "Mysterious Skin" that will make it chillingly recognizable to some viewers and important to recognize for others.
Araki spares no detail in showing how Neil's coach (Bill Sage) cultivates his young victim, taking him home to a wholesome-looking ranch house full of video games, toys and variety packs of sugary cereals.
The scenes between the coach and young Neil (played by Chase Ellison) are sickening, as are the ways Neil later copes with his experience, becoming a kind of predator in his own right.
If "Mysterious Skin" becomes a bit schematic in keeping Neil and Brian apart and then bringing them together as adults (wouldn't they have known each other all along in such a small town?), and if it seems too deeply steeped in its literary provenance, it is still a startling portrayal of how the cycle of abuse plays itself out in the lives of its victims, who are in danger of either sliding into nothingness or becoming perpetrators themselves.
"Mysterious Skin" would be tragic if it weren't for the glint of redemptive hope Araki offers at the end, but its pervading mood of sadness nonetheless suggests that some wounds never heal.GO!
-- "Mysterious Skin" (99 minutes) is not rated. It contains graphic scenes of sexuality, sexual violence, profanity and drug use.
'MYSTERIOUS SKIN' • Featuring:Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Jeff Licon, Michelle Trachtenberg, Elisabeth Shue, Bill Sage, directed by Gregg Araki • Where:Osio in Monterey • Rating:Unrated, contains intense thematic material, pedophilia, violence, rape, obscenity and sexual scenes • Running time:99 minutes
'Skin' deep
Indie filmmaker Gregg Araki comes of age with fascinating, disturbing 'Mysterious Skin'
By DESSON THOMSON
The Washington Post
Mysterious Skin" is a helter-skelter ride of the soul, an unblinking, white-knuckle crash landing into the mushy mysteries of the subconscious.
Gregg Araki's movie, which makes an ingenious, dark metaphor out of extraterrestrial visitation, is not for the fainthearted, the squeamish or the inflexibly decent.
It plunges headlong and unequivocally into themes of pedophilia, prostitution, rape and I haven't even mentioned alien probing.
While watching this movie, I scribbled the word "whoa" five times into my notebook.
Two young men, in voice-over, recount their traumatic stories, side by side, as it were.
One is 18-year-old Brian Lackey (Brady Corbet), who has no conscious explanation for two blackout experiences in his childhood, one of which has caused him to have spontaneous nosebleeds when he's under stress.
He has also suffered nightmares and wet beds. In his teen years, he sees a television show about alien abductions and comes to believe he may have been the victim of an encounter himself.
He contacts one of the women interviewed on the show and discovers she shares many of his experiences.
The other storyteller is Neil McCormick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a gay hustler in his late teens, whose formative sexual experiences consisted of pleasuring himself at the age of 8, while watching his promiscuous mother (Elisabeth Shue) in an intimate encounter.
At the same tender age, he also had consensual (according to him) sex with his male baseball coach Heider (Bill Sage).
Sick of the two-bit transactions he's having in his Kansas home town, he moves to New York City. But his risky behavior there sets him up for almost certain disaster.
"Where people have a heart," observes Neil's best friend, Wendy (Michelle Trachtenberg), "Neil McCormick has a bottomless black hole."
Why these two men's histories are in the same drama becomes apparent later.
But until that time, we watch -- fascinated, appalled and powerfully moved -- as they recount whole lives spent in a downward spiral.
Brian is so traumatized he has been unable to enjoy any kind of intimacy, but Neil, who believes he feels a liberated awakening about his sexuality, walks without hesitation toward sexual self-obliteration.
Each story oddly complements and fortifies the other, in terms of gearing up the dread, the desperation and the suspense.
And when they converge, the boys' fusion of anger, bitterness, regret and revelation is mesmeric.
If you have thrived from your experiences with any combination of filmmakers David Lynch, Todd Solondz, David Cronenberg and Larry Clark, you might be prime audience material for this film.
And yet, Araki, who made such thematically intense and sexually graphic films as "The Living End," "Totally Fed Up" and "The Doom Generation," ratchets things even more acutely than those directors.
But he does it with silky, inspired skill. Despite the hard-edged, controversial subject matter, he makes you view the taboo from another perspective.
In those moments, you at least temporarily reconsider your paradigm for morality.
When Coach Heider seduces the boy, yes, it is pedophilia and a deeply immoral offense.
But in the context of Araki's film, something else is happening. The 8-year-old Neil, who has a big crush on his coach, has partly engineered this seduction, and he's perhaps even more lost in the passionate moment than Heider.
But whether Neil really had the halcyon experience he thought he did becomes a later matter.
Corbet is note perfect as the crushed, anguished Brian, who's determined to understand what has happened to him; and Gordon-Levitt's harrowing turn as Neil surely marks him for even greater roles ahead.
There's something extraordinarily tender about him as he takes you through his personal nightmare. (He has come a long way since playing Tommy Solomon in TV's "3rd Rock From the Sun.")
Their performances are so vital for the dangerous brinkmanship of this movie.
And behind the camera, Araki is the steadying force, hands firmly on the wheel of this bucking, swerving vehicle.
His unblinking conviction makes this movie, at least by its own standards, a disturbing triumph.GO!
'MYSTERIOUS SKIN' (Unrated, 99 minutes) -- Contains intense thematic material, pedophilia, violence, rape, obscenity and sexual scenes
Taut 'Skin' is brutal yet brilliant
'Skin' is both touching, unnerving
BY WESLEY MORRIS
The Boston Globe
The two Kansas boys who undergo a traumatizing sexual experience in the haunting new movie "Mysterious Skin" grow into young men troubled in radically different ways.
Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) becomes a gay hustler, a feral viper whose innocent eyes and drawn, boyish face suggest that his viciousness is just a pose.
But it's impenetrable all the same: He's equipped to hurt people.
Brian (Brady Corbett) turns asexual and reroutes his psychic disfigurement into a geeky, almost religious obsession with extraterrestrials.
He believes he was abducted by aliens and spends the movie trying to uncover the nature of the abduction.
His search leads him to another alleged abductee, played poignantly by Mary Lynn Rajskub, and eventually back to Neil, his Little League teammate all those years ago.
Set mostly in the late 1980s, "Mysterious Skin" traverses a pulpy, punky landscape of ache and rage.
The catalyst for that pain is the man who molested the boys, generically but indelibly called Coach -- played with surpassing tenderness by Bill Sage, who here sports a killer Mark Spitz mustache.
The scenes of the crime are discreetly, tastefully, almost lovingly filmed, mostly from the man's perspective. (It's one of the movie's more audacious suggestions that the teenage Neil is loveless because Coach stole both his innocence and his heart.)
Director Gregg Araki adapted "Mysterious Skin" from the evocative 1995 novel by Scott Heim.
The book worked hard to keep Brian's memory of what happened to him suspensefully opaque, while Araki focuses more on illustrating the evolution of Neil and Brian.
But more significantly, Heim's book has given Araki's filmmaking a new sense of narrative purpose.
The film is actually a major artistic breakthrough for Araki, a onetime bad boy of independent filmmaking.
Its psychological intelligence, attention to emotional currents, and humanity are surprises.
Could this be the same man who created the hateful wasteland known as "The Living End"? That movie was a long time ago (1992), and so were his others, including "The Doom Generation" and "Splendor," sensationalist films that sullied American art houses in the 1990s.
Araki's attraction to the danger in Heim's novel makes sense. The director used to be among a group of troublemaking gay directors (including Todd Haynes) who used controversy to combat artistic complacency.
Haynes evolved into "Safe" and "Far From Heaven." Araki long remained stuck in nihilistic petulance.
He's 45 now, and "Mysterious Skin" is his first movie of this millennium.
The usual Araki elements are here (hustlers, rebels, uproar, the absurd), but now he appears to be working with focus and compassion.
His movie is sensual and comic, bizarre and piercing, brutal and otherworldly, like Pedro Almodovar dreaming in the key of Gus Van Sant.
Araki has never been an actor's director (he rarely hires trained ones), but the performances here are generally strong (an exception is Michelle Trachtenberg, sadly miscast as Neil's artist-freak best friend).
Corbett does deceptively smart work as Brian, who is closed-off, weird, and remote in just the way you'd expect someone preoccupied with aliens to be.
Because Levitt is so volcanic, it's easy to overlook Corbett's sensitive work.
And Levitt, a long way from "Third Rock From the Sun," is very good in a part that calls for truculence and sorrow.
When the film goes violently bleak toward the end, Levitt follows, body and soul.
He shows us Neil's aching spirit, letting out a great, primal howl at one point that could have come from James Dean.
It's a shout that can't be lost on Araki. The rebel has finally found his cause.GO!
Mysterious Skin
Directed by: Gregg Araki
Written by: Araki, adapted from the novel by Scott Heim
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbett, Bill Sage, Elisabeth Shue, Michelle Trachtenberg, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Jeff Licon
Running time: 99 minutes
Rated: NC-17 (Language, scenes of simulated sex, and one sequence of child molestation)
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorrisglobe.com.
'Mysterious Skin,' deft and haunting
By ANN HORNADAY
The Washington Post
Of all the representations of pedophilia in movies recently, from "Mystic River" to Kevin Bacon's powerful performance as a recovering abuser in "The Woodsman" to Todd Solondz's treatment of the subject in the unsettling, if condescending, "Palindromes," "Mysterious Skin" might be the most unflinching depiction of how sexual predation reverberates over time, like toxic ripples through a pond.
In this sad, often unnervingly graphic adaptation of the acclaimed novel by Scott Heim, former child TV star Joseph Gordon-Levitt ("3rd Rock From the Sun") delivers a haunting, uncompromising performance as Neil McCormick, a young man who at 8 was seduced by his Little League coach.
Now a gay hustler cruising for tricks in his tiny home town in Kansas, Neil has the half-lidded, sneering gaze of a teen-ager who has embraced nihilism, not as a fashion statement but as a survival mechanism.
He's shut off and shut down, careering down a frightening path of unsafe sex and increasingly violent encounters that seem to be leading inexorably to his self-destruction.
Meanwhile Brian Lackey (Brady Corbet) is heading down his own path, searching for answers to the pivotal episode in his young life, when he witnessed a UFO landing and was abducted by aliens.
Narrated by both characters as young men, "Mysterious Skin" traces how their lives intersected as kids, and what led to the mysteries they're living with as adults.
Director Gregg Araki, until now best known for such transgressive gay-themed underground films as "The Doom Generation" and "Nowhere," has made the most mature movie of his career, one that deftly cuts not only between the stories of these wildly different young men, but also between past and present within those stories.
Capturing 1980s suburban ennui just as vividly as early-'90s New York, Araki suffuses both worlds with a dreamlike quality, one that at times threatens to make "Mysterious Skin" more like a parable than realistic drama.
Similarly, its characters often speak in improbably well-turned phrases that seem more literary than lived. (For some reason, the plummiest lines are given to the film's two female leads -- Elisabeth Shue, who plays Neil's blowzily unaware mother, and Michelle Trachtenberg as his bad-girl best friend.)
Still, for its occasional ponderousness, there is a terrible, terrifying honesty at the core of "Mysterious Skin" that will make it chillingly recognizable to some viewers and important to recognize for others.
Araki spares no detail in showing how Neil's coach (Bill Sage) cultivates his young victim, taking him home to a wholesome-looking ranch house full of video games, toys and variety packs of sugary cereals.
The scenes between the coach and young Neil (played by Chase Ellison) are sickening, as are the ways Neil later copes with his experience, becoming a kind of predator in his own right.
If "Mysterious Skin" becomes a bit schematic in keeping Neil and Brian apart and then bringing them together as adults (wouldn't they have known each other all along in such a small town?), and if it seems too deeply steeped in its literary provenance, it is still a startling portrayal of how the cycle of abuse plays itself out in the lives of its victims, who are in danger of either sliding into nothingness or becoming perpetrators themselves.
"Mysterious Skin" would be tragic if it weren't for the glint of redemptive hope Araki offers at the end, but its pervading mood of sadness nonetheless suggests that some wounds never heal.GO!
-- "Mysterious Skin" (99 minutes) is not rated. It contains graphic scenes of sexuality, sexual violence, profanity and drug use.
'MYSTERIOUS SKIN' • Featuring:Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Jeff Licon, Michelle Trachtenberg, Elisabeth Shue, Bill Sage, directed by Gregg Araki • Where:Osio in Monterey • Rating:Unrated, contains intense thematic material, pedophilia, violence, rape, obscenity and sexual scenes • Running time:99 minutes
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