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If movies have taught us one thing over the last few years, it's that the suburbs are a very dark, very screwed-up place. L.I.E. confirms this semi-revelation by taking the gritty subject matter of Kids and moving it about 35 miles east to Dix Hills in Long Island's Suffolk County. The title refers to the Long Island Expressway in a not-so-subtle metaphor for the fate of L.I.E.'s main character, who explains that some of the freeway's lanes go straight to hell, having claimed the lives of such notables as singer/songwriter Harry Chapin and director Alan J. Pakula, as well as his own mother, who bought it on Exit 52.
His name is Howie Blitzer (Paul Franklin Dano) and he's a scrawny 15-year-old with braces and a talent for poetry. Howie is a good kid who has fallen in with a bad crowd, no doubt thanks to his mother's death and his father Marty's (Bruce Altman, Girl Interrupted) refusal to get involved in his son's life. The two are clearly haunted by the death of their mother and wife, with Marty turning to 80-hour workweeks and a live-in bimbo for comfort, while Howie occasionally pulls a shoebox of his mother's bathroom effects down from a shelf just so he can smell her perfume.
Part of the aforementioned "wrong crowd" includes Gary Terrio (Billy Kay, The Guiding Light), a pierced, tattooed young man who gets Howie and two others involved in a series of home break-ins that usually consist of raiding the refrigerator (they're just bored, misguided kids, you see). Gary, who holds somewhat of a sexual spell over Howie, is also a rent boy who leads Howie to commit a basement burglary of a john upon whom he'd like to exact a bit of revenge.
Howie knows nothing about Gary's extracurricular activities or that he's being led into the den of one of the area's biggest pedophiles, "Big John" Harrigan (Brian Cox, Rushmore), who hears the boys' attempt to rob him, gives chase and manages to tear the pocket off of Howie's jeans. The ex-Marine (his license plate reads "BJ," which refers to both his nickname and something he claims he can do better than anybody in the western hemisphere) and pillar of the local community sniffs the pocket like an animal, which is probably the most disturbing screen inhaling since Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. Like Velvet, it's a sign of bad things to come...or so you might think.
A typical film about a child abuser would portray Big John as pure, unadulterated evil, but here, he's kind and almost loving. He listens to Howie, which is something his own father never does. The relationship forged between Howie and the 60-something would-be monster is far from predictable, and the film never judges any of its characters, whether they diddle young boys or ignore their kids. With an odd twist on that famous scene from The Graduate, the film succeeds at getting the audience to empathize with a pedophile, and for that, L.I.E. is somewhat groundbreaking.
L.I.E. is the debut of writer/director Michael Cuesta, who co-penned the script with Stephen M. Ryder and Gerald Cuesta. While the story sometimes loses its way, the trio does a wonderful job at developing each of these characters. The film looks great, too, and is highlighted by a scene in which Howie and Gary break into each other's homes and ransack each other's rooms.
Those of you brave and lucky enough to see L.I.E. will be treated to Cox's terrific performance that - and I can pretty safely guarantee this - nobody will be talking about at the office water cooler. No one would blame you for being scared away by the film's content and its unfair NC-17 rating, which was affixed by a clearly clueless MPAA. L.I.E. contains absolutely no nudity and only implied sexual content. If anything, it's something parents should want their kids to see, just so they can understand evil sometimes comes in surprising disguises.
1:40 - NC-17 for language, graphic sexual dialogue and violence
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