Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner), the young hero of Son of Rambow, does OK quoting scripture, but his real passion lies in the elaborate doodles covering the pages of his Bible. Will's drawings of fantastic creatures cavorting in brilliantly colored landscapes fill page after page of the boy's Good Book, but at the bottom corner of each page is what really sets his heart racing: a series of sequential sketches that, when flipped through, appear to be dancing, devouring one another or otherwise engaged in the mysterious and spectacular illusion of motion.
The pages of Will's Bible are basically storyboards for the film playing in the boy's brain, a red-hot love letter to the cinema made all the more significant because Will Proudfoot has never in his life actually seen a motion picture. Raised by a meekly devout mother belonging to an austere religious sect forbidding modern diversions like movies, Will is a wildly imaginative kid growing up without even rudimentary pop-culture stimulation or any encouragement for his storytelling chops. The poor kid's even denied the sort of overtly dysfunctional family that typically provides the inspiration for budding filmmakers who grow up to make the semi-autobiographical movies that win awards at Sundance.
Will eventually does all right, though, and so does Son of Rambow — a slight but charming British import that, as it happens, knocked more than a few socks off at Sundance, where it was picked up for 8 million bucks and is now turning heads stateside.
The writer-director here is Garth Jennings, previously responsible for the enjoyable, underrated Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Son of Rambow offers up an equally appealing but smaller-scaled, more pragmatic fantasy, noticeably lighter of touch but with a gentle quirkiness bubbling just around the edges of the frame.
Will's personal catalyst and conduit into the modern world is Lee Carter (Will Poulter), an underaged con man and overall hellion who takes full advantage of Will's innocence before eventually recognizing a kindred spirit and taking the little lamb under his wing. Jennings makes sure we realize from the outset that the two boys are brothers under the skin and more alike than not, with the street-smart Lee coming off as much a stranger in the world as the exceedingly naïve Will.
And just to hammer the point home, Lee's outsider status is continually confirmed by all of the other characters denying him a proper name; he's simply "Carter" to everyone except for Will, whose archaic speech softens the effect by throwing in a first name as well.
Like most bullies, Lee is himself bullied — there's a vaguely sadomasochistic relationship with an older brother (Ed Westwick) whom the boy hero-worships despite being pushed around, humiliated and basically used as his sibling's personal slave. The older Carter brother also happens to be one of Britain's original wave of video bootleggers in the early-'80s (when the film is set), and Lee often finds himself duplicating illegal copies of popular movies like the Sylvester Stallone testosterone-fest First Blood — a process secretly observed by an awestruck Will as he hangs in the air, hiding in a canoe suspended from a warehouse ceiling. (It's a moment not quite as magical as it sounds, but still a sight closer to the cinematic poetry of Jean Vigo than the prefab blue-screens of Spielberg).
The effect is immediate and overwhelming. Will's taste of First Blood is nothing less than a ritual deflowering that opens up the floodgates of movie love, and it sends him rushing off into the night like a kid on a monumental sugar high after a lifetime of candy deprivation. Will races through the English countryside practically speaking in tongues, his imagination finally given permission to breath, hallucinating arch foes in passing scarecrows and envisioning himself as a heroically pumped-up mini-mercenary conversing with his own bulging biceps.
Lee puts Will's newly realized passion to good use, enlisting him to work on an amateur production he's entering in a BBC competition — but it turns out that everybody really does want to direct, and Lee's film gets co-opted, first by Will (who turns it into a Rambo remake filtered through his own Freudian demons) and then by an impossibly pretentious French exchange student named Didier (Jules Sitruk), who commandeers it for his own personal vanity project.
Didier is Son of Rambow's secret weapon, an absurdly trendy poseur brimming with a Gallic ennui ("I'm trapped in a world of boredom," he whines) that makes all the girls want to kiss him and all the boys want to be him. Soon enough, his intrusion into Lee and Will's film is driving a wedge between the two friends.
Son of Rambow's final act sets out to overcome this obstacle, along with a series of other tall orders that reach critical mass before arriving in a neat and tidy place located somewhere between heartwarming and cloying. The movie isn't terribly ambitious, but its coming-of-age tale rings true while offering up a lovely little testament to the power of movies, along with a bit of crowd-pleasing slapstick and some frighteningly funny reminders of that moment in the early-'80s when New Wave killed everything that was good about Punk.
Between the big-haired pre-teens spazzing out to Depeche Mode and the flying dog statues crashing through windows to jam sharp objects up the noses of authority figures, there's something here for nearly everyone.
This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2008.
