Bless the Child Chuck and Buck
Cooper, Rand Richards
to be a godly child with special...
...grace of a devilish chuckle...
...In today's America, Wiccan groups this much Christian iconography and meSoon you can test your own sue for equal rights, and two out of three dieval/mystical claptrap-Russell opens hypotheses on a new cut of of your fellow citizens believe in person- with a snow-falling-on-gargoyles night the movie, set for release next month...
...But what I found The Sixth Sense, whose somber mood thing is off with him...
...But it quickly denly steaming breath, Mike Oldfield's by the devil...
...Buck's innocence, on she says-he stares with glazed incomcide and cult-related crime...
...You can do it, but the floating bed, the geysering emesis video), Bless the Child, to give us...
...Is it real now, or the ages...
...Ultimately, Chuck and can stand against the darkness...
...But he's a kid in a man's body, a Mike White, who also wrote the script, angel paperweight...
...But along the way, it gives due chief blasphemy lies in assuming an au- fore we know it, we've landed in a kind weight to the ferocious and insistent dience credulous or craven enough to of stalker film...
...His father very idea of growing up...
...At times, Buck's arrested deCatholic too-in fact, a former Jesuit Arteta's film is one of the uneasiest come- velopment sounds like standard slackseminarian...
...artsy progressive Aunt Maggie (Kim Basinger), turns out self in the foot...
...darkness and light...
...A lapsed Catholic, and a ing it to us, without even the saving some baseless, faceless malevolence, but psychiatric nurse to boot...
...Otherwise, it's neral, he packs up his toys and moves prevailing nostalgia for the virtues and every hoary cliche of 1975, right down to to L.A., where he draws a bead on Chuck innocent fun of childhood...
...You wanna go compelling is the inside look Arteta gives this film tries to imitate, worked in part see my room...
...he excitedly asks his at an obsession...
...Files...
...That the devil one not seen since the Nativity...
...supplying a surprisingly Hollywood perate end days of a genre-a cynical writing a ludicrous play, called Hank ending to this most un-Hollywood of and mindless repetition of form, whose and Frank, that expresses his ardor...
...having died years before, Buck is sud- do in here...
...from the humanity of his protagonist, As it happens, the special-needs school to a large extent keeping us inside turns out to be a Gothic stone fortress of iguel Arteta's Chuck and Buck's hopeless, happy fantasies, even a church, staffed by teams of fervent Buck offers a far different while nudging him toward truly disnuns in immense habits (I kept expecting M take on childhood inno- turbing potentials-a disjunction capone of them to tip her wimple and fly, cence...
...Unable to see that vehicle for a sly narrative challenge...
...Its opening scene er-speak...
...Little Cody's special tal- Child, Buck O'Brien is a kid surrounded ful girl-rocker soundtrack...
...And you might be more to life, the film said, should let little Cody play with a than our benign Main Street Chris- rosary...
...Hey, neat trick with the by toys...
...Be- movies...
...Its innovations consist In fact, he's in love with Chuck-or ting in his way...
...The step by step, "eerie" revelation of and three decades later you can see the Neufeld, worked on the Omen movies, the child's powers...
...The Ex- It's fascinating to encounter a film as nothing on its mind, and from that moorcist set a benchmark for creepiness...
...for the mother's funeral...
...What made The Exorcist so anxieties and follies of every kind, the "X- At this late date, loading a movie with scary, all those years ago...
...character (remember those dark glasses...
...marvels Buck, looking Now there's the understatement of denly alone, and pathetically unequal around Charlie's office...
...he fawns and flushes arcane mumbo-jumbo...
...He's votive candles...
...Buck wants to feel the through Haley Joel Osment's deft por- childhood best friend, Chuck, flown in way he remembers having felt at eleven, trayal of a child's suffocating fear...
...The codger priest who rack that the film stretched us on...
...Arteta works not from having loved...
...Their film posits a reverse Exorcist: Cody And guess who wins...
...It hint- and he and director Chuck Russell seem warns us what we're up against...
...Jon- tells her of "a special-needs school in estown and Waco, the fall of the Evil Brooklyn" for Cody, and adds, "It's Empire, the rise of the born-again Catholic-I don't know if that's a movement, global viral scourges, problem for you," " Maggie fesses up...
...And you shouldn't poohtianity, with good and evil ab- pooh the religiosity of her Central stracted into ethics, or subsumed al- American babysitter, or her Central together into psychology, could American teacher, or any other Cenimagine...
...Like Cody in Bless the tured by the film's dissonantly cheerlike Sally Field...
...al angels...
...But from L.A...
...a little you'd better have irony, or parody, or and 360-degree head swivel, the sud- girl with special gifts, being tormented something, on your mind...
...as if her daughter's plight must be her (Holliston Coleman), an infant dumped A film this intent on ignoring its own fault: careerist/celebrity single mother...
...More ed at the coming culture wars, giving us to have been time-capsuled straight from chanting...
...derivative-as belatedly derivative-as ment on, you know exactly what's comUltimately, though, it's ideas that shock, Bless the Child...
...Uh-oh....Well, progressivism of the era...
...After the fu- Chuck and Buck doesn't indulge our opportune moments...
...This is a real-life stalker memory, amid a life filled with hurt, of take it all one more time, and then stick- film, however...
...becomes clear that Bless the Child has haunting "Tubular Bells" theme...
...to be a godly child with special powers, whom agents of Satan pursue in an atRand Richards Cooper tempt to turn her to their evil ends or, failing that, to destroy her...
...Already the doom squad is prowling the city, scoopEXORCISMS ing up kids born on the fateful date and 'Bless the Child' & 'Chuck and Buck' eliminating them-just like Herod's slaughter of the innocents, we're told, in case we didn't get it...
...Jimmy Smits Farrelly Brothers, a subgenre of child-in- and can barely see anyone else...
...As his overtures meet in a few computer-generated winged Charlie, as he's known out in L.A., a suc- with rejection, bafflement turns into demons, a trio of astral angels resem- cessful music executive...
...Bless in a highly romanticized memory of these annoyances are actually Chuck's the Child, on the other hand, has noth- their friendship...
...The Exorcist was seen The Exorcist, hasn't she...
...Yada yada yada...
...Conplays the FBI agent called in to investi- an-adult's-body comedies that invite us fronted with adult perspectives, for ingate the disappearing kids, which has to recall the innocent fun of playing stance from the woman he's paying to stymied a battalion of New York City around (like Tom Hanks in Big) or poke vanity-stage his play- "it's a homosexdetectives-he's "a specialist," says the satiric fun at the adult world (Peter Sell- ual misogynistic erotic love story, right?," cop who introduces him, "in ritual homi- ers in Being There...
...It's Catholicism used for quintessential- comical, how obviously she's being ly American Protestant ends, herald- set up...
...Catholicism in this movie is a bunch spate of arrested-development movies tively star-struck-his eyes go fluttery of really cool stunts tied together with over the years, from Forrest Gump to the with adoration...
...and some viewers will see this qualifies him to pronounce, after a five- shows Buck among his toys, as in the entire film as an expression of profound second glance at the evidence, "Whoev- next room his ill mother is literally generational ambivalence toward the er did this has a background in classical coughing herself to death...
...And yet here comes writing a novel with a Bronte-like "Dear there were the gruesome special effects: a movie (you may have to catch it on Reader" narrator...
...Jimmy's the other hand, isn't really funny, and prehension...
...Tm might be literally real-and active not sure I believe in that kind of in a child-attacked a certain comfy thing," says Maggie...
...From the start we see some- is it still, like, a game...
...He's fixed on that point of his turn...
...tral American...
...What do you cult mysticism...
...with calls, peering through windows Buck backs away from its own darkness, Bless the Child illuminates the des- while Chuck and his fiancee make love...
...You can't believe, for infriends...
...On the night of Cody's birth, ing another swing of the moral pen- a woman in a bus mentions to Magdulum back from permissiveness gie that there's a Christmas star out, toward puritanism...
...Years ago, the wounded petulance, then weeping, bling nothing so much as flying jelly- two engaged in some childhood sex self-pitying rage, and the light situafish, and a few inanely smiling by- games, and Buck remains in thrall to the tional humor of the film takes a darker standers, cadged from "Touched by an memory...
...El Commonweal 18 September 22, 2000...
...The producer, Mace ing...
...One supposes that's what dies you'll ever see...
...Angel," who chip in to save Maggie at life, and fixated on Chuck...
...But these aren't MagWell, a lot of water has churned gie's biggest sins...
...In his dawdling, shy- child's selfish singleness of purpose renegade priest, shouting such lines as child way, he's unstoppable-hanging lodged in an adult's body, an adult's "All of us are chosen by God-all of us around Chuck's office, plaguing him life, is dangerous...
...Of course, whole new ballgame...
...Aha...
...the entire film was really a soon becomes clear that Buck is mired calls it, perplexed...
...Neat trick with the dead ly at the age of eleven...
...Socially and spiritually it's a scene set to ominous chanting-is like But I'll hazard a few now...
...A climactic confrontation of the guilt and shame of Ellen Burstyn's 1978 into your neighborhood cineplex...
...I mean, she's by Max von Sydow...
...The and nothing else is real to him, be it also because the movie had something two haven't seen each other since Chuck Charlie's new friends, his house, car, job, new to offer, namely, the huge plot twist moved away fifteen years ago, and it fiancee-"all this other stuff," as Buck at the end...
...by her drug-addict mother at the door of pedigree unavoidably keeps shooting itpolitically involved...
...ents bloom...
...Indeed, a the embarrassment of Ian Holm, as the and zeroes in...
...There you should believe in it...
...to the task...
...When a colleague under the bridge since 1973...
...New Age spiritualism, millennial Satan's little girl "Actually," she says, "I was raised a Commonweal 17 September 22, 2000 Catholic...
...life, he's indignant when they keep geting new to offer...
...And it gave us Jason Miller's stance, that Maggie would be this Father Karras, pitting his good in- slow to twig to the meaning of cuttentions and modern measure of lery that starts shaking, and candles skeptical doubts against the harsh, that spontaneously ignite, when her stoical, and absolutist priest played adopted girl is around...
...Neat trick with the twenty-seven-year-old stuck emotional- plays Buck with total conviction...
...We've seen a sweet, and in Chuck's presence posibird...
Vol. 127 • September 2000 • No. 16
