Billy Weber
1993
Watched: 02/17/24
Grade: D
“You’re in my damn room”, it was the only scene, the only moment, that I remembered from this movie. I guess there are just some things that can become tragically indelible to a ten year old because, although my memory had it errantly transcribed as “you’re in my god damn room”, I have been revisited regularly by Josh’s(Jacob Tierney) tearful delivery of this line ever since. My childhood recollection was not strong enough to retain the exact cause of the declaration beyond the vague notion of the familial dysfunction, but what was not lost between that viewing and this is the sting of it and the heavy sense of injustice that permeates the entire status quo of this adventure. Like The Wizard before it, this movie is tonally very difficult to place. What is safe to say is that it can hardly be boiled down to the “Comic Adventure” the advertising proposes.
At first Josh seems to be the most annoying type of child imaginable, rude to his mother, his brother, and any other person unlucky enough to speak with him. However, once the particulars become more apparent he becomes much easier to sympathize with. Josh and his brother, Sam(Noah Fleiss), live primarily with their mother(Joan Allen)-who will get attention of her own later- and occasionally travel to visit their newly remarried father(Stephen Toblowsky) and his two step-sons, one of which is interestingly played by a very young Jake Gyllenhal. Josh finds an outlet for his frustrations not only in verbal attacks but also by fostering dangerous hobbies such as lying, lock picking, and credit-card fraud. The latter of these he uses indiscriminately though it is focused in the main on his mother’s new boyfriend Jean-Pierre(Ronald Guttman). Sam on the other hand manifests his distress in fighting and becoming detached, so much so that his peers take to calling him “Alien” and “Space-man”.
On the way to their father’s, Sam decides that Josh is no longer his brother and cites his parent’s divorce as precedent for one’s right to choose one’s own family. Seeing a second grader so realistically adopt the bad behavior of his parents is really heartbreaking and only the first in a series of gut punches that this comedy has in store for its audience.
When the boys arrive, it is established that their father has very traditional expectations of masculinity for his boys-in the form of physical and emotional toughness- that Sam meets easily, but Josh does not. Sam is good at sports, is cold and unaffected, and is willing to fight for himself while Josh is sarcastic, emotional, and uncoordinated. This leads to creating an outsider status for Josh with his father’s new family. Unfortunately, Josh contributes to his own isolation by lashing out at Sam who claims to plan to exchange Josh for Curtis and Leon(his step-brothers) who don’t care for Josh either. This leads to the step-brothers enlisting Sam’s reluctant aid in mercilessly taunting Josh at dinner prompting the previously mentioned outburst.
All of this is prelude and explanation for why Josh then comes up with an elaborate plan to convince Sam that he is a government experiment (Strategically Altered Mutant) that his parents are using to fund their own selfish endeavors. At first this seems to be an attempt to drive a rift between Sam and their step-brothers but spins out of control when they find out that their mother is planning to leave them with their father for a year while she lives with Jean-Pierre in Europe. Josh reinforces and elaborates on this lie with Sam in the vain attempt to use Sam’s strange behavior as an excuse to keep her from leaving. And her response is perhaps the most chilling and narcissistic response a mother on film has ever delivered to a desperate child, “I need to take care of myself now, you understand don’t you?”(18:43).
The parents in this film deserve special attention for the subtle villainy that seeps out of every frame either of them are in- or perhaps more importantly in the scenes the film withholds from us. It might do to look at another film that succeeds in doing what this movie appears to be attempting, namely Home Alone. In that case, the parents also are shown as being inattentive to the needs of one of their children though in that instance more out of a sense of stressful neglect rather than persistent poor parenting. However, the instant that they realize that Kevin has been left behind the panic, desperation, and fear immediately set in. The cathartic embrace at the end of the film is not simply a child being rescued from a dangerous situation, but a tearful climactic moment for the mother whose journey from frustration to devastation to redemption the audience is allowed to experience in full. Josh and S.A.M, intentionally or not, gives no such redemptive arc for its parent characters. In fact, the only contact Josh has with his father after he runs away is a phone call where he’s berated, and his mother never appears again except in passing where we find out that she’s gotten remarried. In short, though Kevin does share some culpability for the state of his familial relationships, Josh is at the mercy of some historically miserable parenting which if it does not excuse it surely explains his malfeasance. There is no tear stained joyful embrace at the end of this film, and to be honest, these parents don’t deserve one. The movie does not give its audience one scene of their panicked responses to the fact that their children are missing. Far from this there isn’t an indication that such a reaction even occurred. However, complaints about the parenting are secondary to the goals of the film itself, and it is perhaps unfair to discuss it at length when the film’s intent is clearly to show the arc of the relationship between two boys.
On a one night layover in Texas caused by a turn in the weather, Josh decides to run away, initially planning to do so without Sam. Ultimately, Josh’s lies collect and compound and he finds himself on the run in a stolen sports car, believing himself to be a murderer, and in the company of a little brother he has convinced is an engineered killing machine. The adventure moves along from there as the boys, committing what could easily be described as a crime spree, flee from their troubles: real and imagined. Along the way they join forces with a teenage runaway(Alison) who strangely participates in Josh’s lie and takes on the persona of the Liberty Maid in his story which only further convinces Sam of the tales veracity. She fairs only slightly better than the boys’ parents due to her own age and vulnerability, but the fact that she abandons Josh after Sam decides to make the last leg of the journey to Canada on his own is a sign that even she fails morally with respect to these children.
After going through great lengths to disabuse Sam of the lie he created, Josh finally convinces his little brother to return home though, still believing himself guilty of murder, he chooses to stay on the run. This leads to perhaps the second most powerful moment in the film, Sam and his father driving home after their offscreen reunion. Even here the father manages to seem more agitated with than scared for his missing son, and wonderfully young Sam actually confronts his father on this very score. “What do you care dad? You never liked Josh anyway”(1:28:57), and this leads to the father’s confession that his harshness toward Josh is a misguided attempt to prepare him for the harshness of the wider world. In response to this logic Sam delivers one of the most staggering lines in the film which haunted me for several minutes after the credits had rolled. When referring to his father’s attempt to prepare Josh for the cruel mean world Sam says, “...you must have done a good job…I think Josh likes the cruel and mean world better than home”(1:29:30). The father’s stunned silence is the closest thing to resolution or acknowledgment on the part of either parent, and the film gives neither a chance to redeem themselves.
Instead the last moments of the film focus on highlighting the brother’s renewed relationship in a short but touching moment. I still have a difficult time referring to this film as a comedy as so many of its implications are shrouded in a real darkness. The child actors do extremely well, and on more than one occasion they expertly deliver truly challenging lines. Both Josh and Sam are incredibly sympathetic and watching their relationship evolve through their trials is engaging despite the overall weakness of the movie. Considering all of this, it is even difficult to say that this is a children’s movie. Sadly, or perhaps inspiringly, the truth seems to be that since everyone in the lives of these two boys has failed them so completely that Josh and Sam have to take it upon themselves to be their own rescuers, and this is a very powerful lesson indeed.
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