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Son of Rambow Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG-13 (some violence and reckless behavior) Genre: Comedy, Drama Theater release: May 02, 2008 by Paramount Vantage Directed by: Garth Jennings Runtime: 1 hour 36 minutes Cast: Bill Milner (Will Proudfoot), Will Poulter (Lee Carter), Jessica Stevenson (Mary Proudfoot), Neil Dudgeon (Joshua), Jules Sitruk (Didier Revol), Ed Westwick (Lawrence) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) and Lee Carter (Will Poulter) first meet in the school corridor one day when neither is in class. Lee is there because he's a young hooligan who's been thrown out of the classroom. Will is there because his science class is watching a documentary videotape, and his ultra-conservative religious persuasion—Plymouth Brethren—doesn't permit him to watch movies or television. The next day they're both out in the same corridor again, for the same reasons.

There's a Darwinian ruthlessness in the events that follow as Lee remorselessly bullies, cons and domineers Will, who's so sheltered and isolated (turns out fish in a barrel are easier to shoot) that he doesn't even understand that he's being abused, and before long Will comes to regard Lee as a friend. Yet the two boys have more in common than first appears, and zero-sum attrition is ultimately not the final word on their relationship.

After making his feature debut with the rather inspiration-challenged big-screen Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, director Garth Jennings wisely shifts to a more intimate and personal canvas with Son of Rambow, a quirky British indie, set in the early 1980s, that made a splash at Sundance. Although somewhat scattered and uneven, Rambow has enough heart and wit to sustain its 96-minute running time.

Bill Milner as Will Proudfoot

Both Will and Lee live inside their heads, and seek creative outlet in image making. Lee's inner world is populated by mainstream culture images and icons, such as Sly Stallone's hero John Rambo in First Blood, which Lee pirates with a clunky camcorder at a theater screening. Will, of course, has never experienced anything like that, but at Lee's house he has an electrifying encounter with those contraband images of Stallone battling law-enforcement officials in the mountain wilderness of Washington State.

Will's worried mother (Jessica Stevenson)—and the members of their strict Brethren community, like faux-concerned Brother Joshua (Neil Dudgeon)—would doubtless say that Lee has "corrupted" Will by exposing him to First Blood. The reality, though, may be a little more complicated, as suggested by the awed eagerness with which Will embraces this Hollywood pop mythology … and the darker themes running through Will's imagination even before he met Lee.

Will's literal and figurative Bible is a dogeared, heavily decorated volume crammed and overwritten (presumably for lack of other writing material) with doodles, flip-book animations and other graffiti. The whimsy of Will's imagination doesn't obscure a running theme of darkness: one of Will's hand-animated scenarios involves an airplane that grows legs and feet as it comes in for a landing—yet once safely on the ground it unexpectedly explodes and bursts into flames.

Will and Lee (Will Poulter) getting into character

If Lee can't bear all the blame for "corrupting" Will, perhaps "corrupting" isn't entirely the right word in the first place. For generations well-intentioned parents, teachers and guardians have sought to remove toy weapons and violent play from the nursery, backyard and playground. Many children have grown up sheltered from stories about scary monsters, witches and giants—anything that could induce nightmares. Yet nightmares come anyway, and, deprived of external inspiration, children willy-nilly invent monsters, weapons and hair-raising scenarios of their own devising. Perhaps there is something about how children develop that is served by such play and such stories (not that I'm advocating First Blood for ten-year-olds).

While Will creates his flip-book animations, Lee's idea is to make a movie and submit it to a young filmmakers contest run by the BBC children's game show Screen Test. Specifically, he wants to remake First Blood, and coerces Will into participating. Yet in Will it turns out that Lee he has an eager partner with ideas of his own: Will wants to be Son of Rambow (so Will spells the name in his new Stallone-influenced Bible doodles), on a mission to rescue his father. He also has fanciful story ideas, drawn from his own imaginative repertoire, from menacing scarecrows to flying dogs.

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