| Overall Grade: |
A |
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| Story: |
A |
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| Acting: |
A- |
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| Direction: |
A+ |
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| Visuals: |
A |
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Heartrending Reality
by CJ (movies profile)
Apr 19, 2009
1
of
1 people found this review helpful
Rex Reed of the New York Observer writes that every year 300 000 children become victims of child prostitution rings. This movie is about that business, is about the depravity and horror that exists, not just in America but around the world; a reality we tend to turn a blind eye to and go on with our lives, oblivious to the pain and total despair of some of our young children.
This is definitely a movie to watch, one of those movies that stick with you long after you've seen it, bearing graphic mental and tragic psychological imagery the likes shown concerning the Sudanese genocide in 'The Devil Came on Horseback' or South American drug trafficking and drug usage as shown in 'Traffic'.
Leslie is a seven or eight year old young. blond girl living in Pennsylvania who gets abducted on her way back from school by a twisted, amicable, confused, and subtly diabolical child predator played perfectly (and chillingly) by Tom Arnold. Arnold and his more rugged and crude partner, Frank (played also well by Kevin Zegers) raise the children on ice cream, Oreos, lies, pretenses, psychological exercises of false and misplaced trust and love, and sexual abuse, pimping them out to a Judge and his wife, and other sinister characters.
The movie is about the death and destruction of innocent lives, the search for redemption and meaning in the midst of vileness and a world run by monsters who look just like anyone else out there. Leslie's face as she grows up becomes a mask of dulled pain, becomes a sheet of apathy and resignation, there is not so much pain in it anymore, just a realization of lost childhood, a lost life, and the frustration of a world around her carrying on like there was nothing wrong, carrying on as if it couldn't do anything about the horror of her situation.
Of course there's the shelter that attempts to reconnect these kids to life and their parents and family but sometimes they are too far gone and it is too late.
Then there's Donnie, (played wonderfully, but somewhat one dimensionally by Evan Ross) who was also captured by the pedophile duo as a kid and who grows up to become Leslie brother and friend and lover and protector and everything else beautiful and good.
This movie is their heartrending story based on real facts. Watch it and be haunted. Watch it and be horrified. Watch it at your own psychological expense. Watch it if you want to see life from a different perspective, from a more realistic and harrowing point of view.
Directed by Damien Harris, this is one of those essential movies to watch, as urgent as 'Schindler's List' or 'Sometimes in April'.
The movie is on DVD and on instant streaming on Netflix and has not yet seen a wide release in the States. |
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