Destin Daniel Cretton (2013)
Painfully well-meaning and sweet-natured – it’s the good intentions and benevolence of the writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton, rather than the rigours of the damaged lives he describes, which cause the pain. Cretton, who worked up the screenplay from a short (of the same name) that he made in 2008, has an apparently tough subject – the relationships and ordeals of teenagers and the staff supervising them in a foster-care facility – but he so much wants things to work out for his characters that he resolves their difficulties too easily. The main character Grace, one of the staff at the centre, and Jayden, one of the kids there, turn out to share the problem of a physically and sexually abusive father. Twenty-something Grace’s father is about to be released from jail; Jayden’s has been allowed to have his daughter home for the weekend. At the height of her own emotional crisis, Grace goes to Jayden’s home and is dissuaded from beating her sleeping father to death with a baseball bat only when Jayden appears in the bedroom doorway. Instead, both girls use the bat to trash the man’s car and expel their anger: it’s a decisive revenge on both their fathers. Grace had been planning to marry her long-time boyfriend and co-worker Mason, whose baby she’s carrying. When she tells him she’s arranged to have an abortion, however, it’s the last straw for Mason – he tells Grace he can’t take any more and it looks as if their relationship is over. (This is what sends Grace on her way over to Jayden’s house.) Grace’s refusal to open up to Mason is potentially the most interesting element in Short Term 12. This is an intelligent young woman who spends her life in a place where people with problems similar to her own receive counselling yet she can’t talk about herself to anyone. But the implication of – and certainly the emotional inference from – the baseball bat outburst, and, when reconciled with Mason, of Grace’s seeing the embryo of their baby on a screen during a hospital ultrasound, is that she has exorcised all her demons, without ever having confided in Mason.
Short Term 12 is being described as a surprise hit but is its success really much of a surprise? The movie doesn’t have big studio backing or huge names in the cast – although Brie Larson (Grace) is well known and John Gallagher Jr (Mason) is already a Tony winner – but it’s done well on the American festival circuit and there’s clearly an audience ready to accept that an independent film like this is bound to be more ‘honest’ than a Hollywood product. (In fact, the working out of the plot here is facile even by Hollywood standards of solving deep-seated psychological problems.) Although some of the cast have been encouraged by Cretton to flatten their delivery to give their characters an added ‘reality’, the film is well enough acted – Gallagher and Keith Stanfield, as a teenager called Marcus, are particularly good, and Stanfield’s delivery of a rap that Marcus has written about his unhappy family background is enough to transcend the tired idea behind the performance. Brie Larson, who occasionally suggests a less glamorous Cybill Shepherd, is very capable and holds the picture together; Kaitlyn Dever (Jayden) and Rami Malek, as a college student working temporarily at the centre, also do well. But Cretton’s use of a hand-held camera for each crisis and the wimpy score by Joel P West are clichés in this kind of movie and, although I didn’t want to see more blood-letting self-harm among the teenagers than there is, each of their mini-stories is too neatly completed. Short Term 12 is clearly a tribute to the fostering community. Mason is one of the beneficiaries of the love of an Hispanic couple who’ve cared for generations of kids – it’s at a genuinely heartwarming party celebrating their thirty years of fostering that Mason proposes to Grace and she feels secure enough to say yes. Mason is working in the foster-care facility to give something back; Grace wants to help others avoid what she herself has had to go through. There’s no argument about what a challenging and admirable job these people are doing but that doesn’t make Short Term 12 a challenging or admirable film.
2 November 2013
