Evan Morgan (2020)
Abe Applebaum was always going to be a detective. By the time he was twelve, he’d developed a local reputation for solving minor crimes and mysteries, and become something of a celebrity in the small Canadian town of Willowbrook. A major mystery changed things. His friend, Gracie Gulliver, went missing – her disappearance left Abe (Jesse Noah Gruman), as well as upset, stumped. The local police couldn’t do any better but Abe lost self-confidence though not his sense of vocation. Twenty years later, Abe (now Adam Brody) still lives in Willowbrook, where he runs his own detective agency. It’s not a flourishing concern – just him, a bored secretary (Sarah Sutherland) and next to no assignments coming Abe’s way. It doesn’t help that he drinks too much, does drugs, and sometimes oversleeps. One day, high-school student Caroline (Sophie Nélisse), an orphan who lives with her grandparents, walks into the agency. Her boyfriend has been murdered; the police are investigating the crime; but Caroline asks Abe to help, too, and he agrees. He’s never had a murder before.
The Kid Detective is the first feature written and directed by Evan Morgan. I watched it on television without the benefit of subtitles; struggling to catch the dialogue was sometimes frustrating but didn’t stop me from enjoying and admiring the film. Morgan balances skilfully a distinctive character study and an essentially conventional crime mystery – as well as the droll and the unhappy elements of his story. It’s a big help to him that Adam Brody’s performance strikes a perfect balance between those elements, too. Abe straddles – is stuck between – childhood and the grown-up world. His parents’ attitudes reflect, in different, familiar ways, how their son, years ago, ground to a halt. The solicitude of Abe’s mother (Wendy Crewson) is infantilising; his father (Jonathan Whittaker) wants to know when Abe will grow up and get himself a proper, paying job. (No time soon: Abe takes on the murder investigation free of charge.) The romantic isolation of a good-looking man in his early thirties, although Abe’s predicament might seem to mean this doesn’t need explaining, is striking nonetheless – and The Kid Detective‘s ending is powerful. Abe solves not only the murder of Caroline’s boyfriend but also the disappearance of Gracie Gulliver yet his dual success leaves him feeling desolated rather than vindicated. In the film’s closing scene, sitting with his parents, Abe cries like a child.
If the truculent secretary stands out as an obvious, cartoonish character, it’s because The Kid Detective, for the most part, does such a good job of avoiding the obvious. The opening titles are accompanied by Nancy Sinatra’s ‘Sugar Town’. That song’s pretty simplicity could be used with blunt satirical intent – as a means of depicting Willowbrook as nowheresville or as a seething cauldron of vice – but Morgan takes care to ensure the place isn’t any one thing. By the end of the film, ‘Sugar Town’ seems to refer, touchingly, to Abe’s arrested development – perhaps, too, to the reward for one of his childhood sleuthing successes: free ice cream for life from a grateful local store owner (Alan Catlin). The linked explanation for the vanishing of yesteryear and the recent murder is a bit melodramatic; the gruesomeness of the suicide of the person behind both crimes is jarring; but neither of those things is a serious flaw. The film is good enough to set up a fresh mystery: how come the writer-director isn’t better known and seems not to have done anything since The Kid Detective? It’s to be hoped the mystery is solved soon by way of Evan Morgan’s sophomore feature.
7 June 2024
