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In "Hollow Reed," a bitter custody battle exposes the torn heart of a modern family.
BY CHARLES TAYLOR + + + + Hollow Reed
P L U S
Austin Powers
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there's an untrustworthy calm to the initial images of Angela Pope's "Hollow Reed," a tension between what we see -- a mundane suburban scene of people driving off to work or tending their lawns -- and how we see it -- through the eyes of an anxious little boy peering furtively through a window blind. It's almost a fairy tale image, the kind about a child locked away from the world. At its simplest, this intelligently directed, beautifully acted British film is the story of 9-year-old Oliver's release from his captivity, and how the secrets he holds come out as he rejoins the world. The revelation of those secrets, though, proves to be an even thornier journey.
Shortly after that opening, Oliver (Sam Bould), sporting a nasty cut over his eye, turns up at the home that his doctor father, Martyn (Martin Donovan), shares with his young lover, Tom (Ian Hart). When Oliver's mother, Hannah (Joely Richardson), comes to collect him at the hospital, it's obvious that the breakup of her marriage to Martyn continues to be acrimonious. As Oliver shows up with more injuries, and the boy's stories of getting beaten up by bigger kids or slamming his hand in the car door don't check out, Martyn comes to suspect that Oliver is being abused by Hannah's live-in lover, Frank (Jason Flemyng). With only a hunch and no confirmation from the terrified Oliver, Martyn, who can't even have Oliver for overnight visits, sets out to win custody of his son, a process complicated by the fact that he's gay.
I realize that sounds like the set-up to some soapy TV movie. But while it's not in the class of Chris Menges' "Second Best" or Diane Keaton's "Unstrung Heroes," "Hollow Reed" is one of the few recent movies that gets at the messiness of real family life. More than the revelation of dark secrets, this picture is about how the most agonizing, complicated choices can be made to seem cut-and-dried and indefensible in the harsh light of a courtroom. Pope and screenwriter Paula Milne scrupulously avoid easy judgments. Playing off Donovan's pained, acutely felt performance, "Hollow Reed," of course, challenges the prejudice that questions a gay parent's fitness. But in a much larger sense, the movie is about how much of ourselves we sacrifice to our responsibility as parents. And that theme is even more daringly played out in the character of Richardson's Hannah.
The most famous custody-battle movie, "Kramer vs. Kramer," depicts the mother as a virus who returns to infect a happy home. There was something deliberately creepy in the way the movie showed Meryl Streep sneaking around New York -- in effect, stalking her son. In "Hollow Reed," Hannah does something far worse. After dismissing Martyn's accusations as absurd, she walks in one afternoon to find Frank hitting Oliver. She orders Frank out of the house, but when he returns in the middle of the night tearfully begging forgiveness, she takes him back, willing to believe his promise that it will never happen again, and agreeing to hide the truth. (Flemyng gets what eludes most actors who play abusers: the abuser's essential weakness, and how that weakness allows them to be master manipulators.)
After having been sexually rejected by Martyn, Hannah can't bear to admit to herself that she was wrong about yet another man. Pope and Milne don't try to hide the cruel fact that she's sacrificing her son's safety to her self-esteem. But rather than condemning or excusing her, they show why she wants so badly to believe Frank's promises. When Martyn's lawyer accuses Hannah of lying about Frank because she isn't able to acknowledge another failed relationship, the scene leaves you emotionally torn. The lawyer's right, but the accusation somehow sounds as simplistic as Hannah's lawyer's charge that Martyn is unfit because he met Tom in a gay bar.
A large part of why Hannah sustains our sympathy is the superb, but underrated, Joely Richardson. She's brilliant at navigating the storm-tossed emotions of a woman who clings to her role as mother because it's the only secure part of her identity remaining. There's a startling moment when she puts Oliver on the school bus the morning of Frank's return, promising him everything will be different. She's wild-eyed and distracted, and she can barely convince herself, let alone her son. (Big-eyed Sam Bould, in a nearly wordless performance, draws us into his character, even as he plays a boy who's withdrawn from a world where the protections of childhood have been abruptly revoked.)
In the best of his previous performances, in Hal Hartley's "Trust" and Michael Almereyda's "Nadja," Donovan exuded a subterranean sweetness beneath a dazed, bewildered response to the world. He's easy to underestimate because he's often facially impassive, but that slight recessiveness is exactly right here. Martyn doesn't want the custody battle to be about him, but about Oliver's welfare. Whether he's asking Tom (the wonderful Hart, John Lennon in "Backbeat," who has a spiky warmth and appealing common sense) to move out or lovingly stroking his son's head, Donovan conveys a man trying bravely to keep his roiling emotions at bay. He does one of the most difficult things an actor can do: He makes simple decency seem neither simple nor dull.
In the midst of a (so far) disappointing movie year, "Hollow Reed" offers balance and nuance, brains and heart. In the midst of the sanctimonious cant about family gushing from the left as well as the right, it offers more. "Hollow Reed" is a small movie. But sometimes portraying the way people really live is one of the biggest things a movie can do.
Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon.
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