Susan Granger’s review of “Son of Rambow” (Paramount Vantage)
This subversively eccentric, low-budget British comedy recalls innocent days – long before YouTube – when kids made neighborhood movies just for the fun of it.
Somewhere in the English countryside in the early 1980s, 11 year-old Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner), the fatherless son of a gentle mother Mary (Jessica Stevenson), lives in a quiet, austere, restricted world, sketching scenes and drawing cartoons. He’s considered an outsider at school because his family is part of a strict Christian sect, the Plymouth Brethren, which forbids corrupting pleasures like newspapers, magazines, novels, music, dancing, motion pictures or television. But when troublemaking, also fatherless Lee Carter (Will Poulter) shows him a pirated copy of Sylvester Stallone’s “First Blood,” the first Rambo movie, and recruits him to help with a homemade action video to win a BBC film competition, Will’s imagination suddenly explodes. Despite their differences, the boys have a great time devising bizarre, often dangerous stunts and concocting home-made special effects, like Will’s flip-book animation. Meanwhile, a group of exchange students arrives from France and wreaks havoc in their village and, when their flamboyant, punk-Goth leader, Didier (Jules Sitruk), starts dominating the movie-within-a-movie, it precipitates a rift between Will and Lee which only friendship and a newfound concept of family can heal.
Best known for their music videos for Radiohead, Beck and Vampire Weekend, director/writer Grant Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith obviously drew on their own childhood memories, and their overlong rambling is saved from shambles by the guileless performances by the child actors and the final few minutes which are truly touching. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Son of Rambow” is a whimsical, coming-of-age 6. It’s poignant but lacks the punch that fully fleshed-out characters and a more cohesive story could deliver.
