"L.I.E."

It stands for Long Island Expressway, and it's a penetrating look at a 14-year-old boy's relationship with a pederast.

By Charles Taylor

Sept. 7, 2001 | "L.I.E." (which stands for Long Island Expressway) is, thankfully, not as ordinary as its title. This first film, directed by Michael Cuesta (who wrote the script with Stephen M. Ryder), takes on a "transgressive" subject, a 14-year-old boy's relationship with a pedophile, and to its credit manages to avoid the smug self-satisfaction that has been the hallmark of American indie movies that have dealt with taboo subjects.

It's always amusing when indie filmmakers talk about their wish to shock "normal" moviegoers with their daring and provocation without realizing that the people they dream of shocking don't go to indie movies. The overwhelmingly liberal, affluent, educated and urban audiences who do turn out for indie movies take it as a matter of duty not to be shocked by what those pictures show them. That would be a sign of the most bourgeois unhipness.

Cuesta appears to feel no need for that type of self-congratulation. His treatment of the material differs from the typical indie approach in several noticeable ways. Though he doesn't particularly find any beauty in the Long Island suburbs where the film takes place, he doesn't, with the exception of a few ill-advised fisheye shots, present them as a strip-mall, cookie-cutter hell (in the manner of "Ghost World," "American Beauty" and anything by Todd Solondz). And though his characters are disaffected suburban kids, they're not dead presences on screen. His lead, Paul Franklin Dano, is a sensitive, expressive young actor who, you feel watching him, might be on the verge of doing some really fine work as his experience and instincts develop.

The most distinctive thing about "L.I.E." is that Cuesta seems to genuinely understand what it means to suspend judgment. I don't mean that he says pedophilia is OK, or that pedophiles are really nice, misunderstood people. Rather, working with a subject that might understandably give any of us pause, he has found a way to get through revulsion and allow us to respond to Brian Cox's Big John Harrigan as a person -- one whose motives are never clear and always somewhat ominous, but still a person.

The center of the movie is Dano's Howie, a 14-year-old boy whose life comes apart in the course of the week the movie covers. A few months before the film begins, his mother has been killed on the Long Island Expressway, and his father (Bruce Altman, who's very good in his small role) has immediately taken up with a young bimbo. Howie is too hurt to see that, for his dad, this anonymous sex is a refuge. He grows more distant from him, cutting classes and joining his buddies in a series of housebreaks. He's particularly close to Gary (Billy Kay), the most daring and charismatic of the group. Gary is also gay (though closeted to his buddies), and Howie tentatively tries to come to terms with his own attraction to Gary, though he can only really deal with those feelings in private.

When a housebreak goes wrong, Howie winds up being pressured by the victim, Cox's Harrigan, to make restitution for a pair of guns he and Gary stole. He can't, so Harrigan, whom Gary had been having sex with, puts pressure on Howie to become his new boy toy. Howie is scared and revulsed; but then Harrigan takes a different tack, letting the boy drive his sports car and encouraging him in the poetry he writes. And when Howie's father, who works as a building contractor, is arrested for using unsafe materials in a job, the stage is set for Big John to become an even larger part of Howie's life.

Next page: A "man's man" who makes sense as a pedophile