Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen BEST MOVIE RISING TO THE OCCASION IT'S DIFFICULT to describe the documentary that Ira Wohl has made about his cousin Philly in terms that aren't cliches. Best Boy is a movie that's...
...One afternoon Philly is allowed to go to the candy store on his.own to buy an ice cream sandwich...
...That one's children are nothing but a heartache is the classic lament of the Jewish mother...
...Suddenly he blurts out to Pearl in his stiff way, "I missed you, Pearl...
...It isn't Pearl's best boy who causes the heartache, really...
...I mean it...
...It's that rare film which is able to remove the quotation marks from such terms and leave us, for once, unembarrassed to use them...
...But as people ponder their choices this year between Carter and Kennedy and Reagan and Bush, nobody should be surprised if a write-in campaign for Philly Wohl develops...
...But it is also people like this teenager...
...We so seldom find evidence that that is possible anymore, we can't help being moved when some turns up as it does here...
...Best Boy is the record of Philly's transition to this new life...
...He had remained, as he himself says, their "best boy...
...This may be because he is out in the sun for a change without those bright lights...
...What gives this testimonial its substance, though, is how decent and giving all the other people in the movie are...
...Philly is a mentally retarded man now in his mid-fifties...
...In 1979 when Max died, Pearl allowed Philly to be moved permanently into a home where he would receive care after her own death, which occurred only six months later...
...Best Boy is a movie that's "heartwarming...
...He becomes an increasingly grim and withdrawn figure...
...When she's taken on a tour of the home to which Philly is moving, she is shown one bedroom to which no 25 April 1980: 243 one has been assigned yet...
...It's even true of the Latin teenager behind the counter in the candy store near Philly's school...
...One of the cliches from which the film removes the quotation marks is the stereotype of the Jewish mother...
...It's just a fact of life which the film reveals...
...It is not only Philly who makes us feel gratified as we watch this movie (though God knows, Philly himself should be enough...
...He comes out front to help Philly find the freezer and the ice cream sandwich in it...
...Goldberg...
...As everyone comes forward to greet him in turn, he doesn't even take off his coat, as if he were trying to decide whether to stay here or just stomp off blindly into the snow outside...
...I can't imagine what cause this enigmatic button might be intended to promote...
...As I think she would be the first fO^dmit, Philly himself is a testimonial to human nature...
...Commonweal: 244...
...None of the mitigating tones we expect to hear in such words are heard this time...
...Unlike the gentle, hovering Pearl, Max seems a rather dour, remote man...
...People outside the family also rise to the occasion of Philly...
...In the lobbies of theaters where Best Boy plays, they are now selling buttons with the film's title on them...
...But for the first time it occurs to us, as he sits with his patch over his eye, that one reason he has seemed an aloof sourpuss is that the bright film lights hurt his eyes...
...Here is man's nature stripped of all its pretenses or excuses, and revealed to be not brutish, but affectionate, ebullient, and funny...
...The scene fades out on a shot of Max smiling wanly at the camera...
...Oh," she says only half-jokingly, "maybe I could have this room...
...The difference is that here, undeniably, the stock situation comes true to life...
...Pearl fusses over Philly continually, offering him chicken soup for lunch, answering questions that other people address to him, worrying about his safety whenever he has to be away from her...
...It's clear that even someone as dependent as Philly needs ways to fend off the sheer constancy of such a mother's love...
...Once he gets there, the Latin kid behind the counter is wonderfully goodnatured to this big, confused Jewish oaf...
...He hurries along the street holding his money before him as if it were taking every ounce of concentration he has to remember where he's going and why...
...All his life, except for a brief, unhappy period in the 1930s, Philly had lived at home in Queens with his parents Max and Pearl...
...But more likely it is because he's visiting Philly at the camp and is at peace about Philly for, perhaps, the first time in his life...
...The moment when she finally has to let go of him is for her so tragic, it's comic...
...One day he returns home from the hospital after an eye operation and sits gruffly in a chair...
...yeah . . . yeah," before the words are even out of her mouth...
...I dreamed about you in the hospital every night I was away...
...So the kid sweetly gives him a tiny bag to put his ice cream sandwich in, and a napkin, before Philly rushes back to school again to show off his purchase...
...Although this always miffs Pearl a bit, it's clearly a habit instilled in Philly by her own, incessant concern for him...
...When the next scene begins, Max is already dead and buried...
...Again we feel a little as if we've wandered into a scene from a TV serial, some re-run that looks rather dated now—say,Mrs...
...The last scene in which we see Max is the first in which he is smiling...
...It's such a heartache, you'll never know...
...There's a sense in which a retarded child like Philly is the perfect son for a Jewish mother...
...Butthena few years ago cousin Ira became concerned about what would happen to Philly after his parents, both already in their seventies, died...
...Whenever she tells Philly anything, he begins to reply impatiently, "Yeah...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...I don't intend this observation with any sarcasm or undue irony...
...It's the eternal complaint of the woman who always feels ili later life that she's being neglected by her son the doctor...
...After that Philly is so uncontainably pleased with himself that he wants the full treatment...
...But Philly isn't the son who became the doctor, and when Pearl speaks of her heartache we know that there isn't one drop of gall or self-pity in the remark...
...This time, the old cliche becomes a simple, painful truth...
...This is true of Philly's teachers...
...It's true of Zero Mostel, who receives Philly backstage after a performance of Fiddler on the Roof...
...As a result, Philly began to be taken out into the world for the first time—to be tested psychologically, to go to the zoo or a musical, to go to school and even to a sleep-away camp...
...Even Max...
...At one point Pearl looks into the camera and says quietly but frankly,' 'If God wanted to punish a person, he should give them a retarded child...
...The heartwarming thing about Best Boy is that it shows us that the system can work—all the systems: value systems, the kinship system, the educational system, the social services system, and ultimately the society itself...
...It's just...
...Over the two years of the film's making, his health deteriorates badly...
...This isn't sentimental, we feel...
Vol. 107 • April 1980 • No. 8
