Movies
The Age
Thursday December 17, 2009
About a Boy (2002)Channel Ten, 9.30pmCHRIS Weitz has now directed €” inadequately in both cases €” two big paperback adaptations: The Golden Compass, his 2007 take on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series and the recent Twilight: New Moon, from the dowager of chaste angst, Stephenie Meyer. Putting aside judgment on the source material, that's two blockbusters handed to a former child of New York City privilege and an English degree from Cambridge. Weitz, who also plays the game as a producer, is smart enough to know that his forte €” droll comedies of the well-off and insecure €” no longer interest Hollywood, so he's segued into fantasies of the young and young at heart and bumbled through the special effects. About a Boy, written and directed with his brother Paul, was his last film to sit in a milieu to which he could respond. Will Freeman (Hugh Grant) is a Londoner of independent means who lives a life of indolence, pursuing consumer goods and women with an equal detachment. When he stumbles into a single-parents group, he ends up attached to Marcus (Nicholas Hoult), an innocent 12-year-old loner with no schoolyard traction and a mother (Toni Collette) struggling with depression. The lessons to be learnt are obvious but here they come with a barbed wit and sure touch. The Weitz brothers had Grant's voice, spiky here, down pat and they should have spent the subsequent years writing for it. CRAIG MATHIESON
© 2009 The Age
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