Shared Darkness
A Communal Life in Film, Examined
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, Malee Chung (Zoë Weizenbaum) and Leonard Fisher (Jesse Camacho), each 12 years old — <B>and their own individual journeys in the wake of the horrible death of Jacob’s outgoing twin brother</B> in a fire started by two bullies. Quiet and introverted, Jacob has a large birthmark on his face, and a sinking despondency in his heart because he feels like his parents’ (Linus Roache and Jayne Atkinson) favorite son died. Pudgy Leonard was with Jacob’s brother Rudy during the accident, and from it suffers a loss of taste that stunts his appetite and puts him increasingly at odds with his parents (Tom McGowan and Jessica Sorto). Meanwhile, raised by her divorced therapist mother Carla (Annabella Sciorra), and <B>desperately seeking a father figure, preternaturally bright Malee latches onto construction worker Gus Maitland</B> (Jeremy Renner), a patient of her mother’s with his own pained past.<BR><BR>Directed by Michael Cuesta (<I>L.I.E.</I>), <B><I>12 & Holding</I> assays in smart, small ways some of the various psychological manifestations of youthful abandonment and/or neglect</B>. The reality of pre-teen adolescence in the thinking set, at least as I recall it, is that while crucial structural and analytical experience lags, there’s an intellectual process that’s generally far more complex than most adults give kids of this age proper credit for. Along with physical development, though, morality and judgment are in wild flux at this stage, and <B>it’s here that Anthony Cipriano’s screenplay seems to bend too strongly to whimsy and contrivance</B>.<BR><BR>Jacob takes unsupervised visits to the juvenile hall where the two older boys responsible for his brother’s death are confined; he repeatedly threatens one of them, and then, much later in the film, makes plans to run away with him. Leonard’s arc, meanwhile, is rendered in broad, caricaturized strokes; when he starts exercising and eating better, his shrewish parents crack down on him, resulting in him taking a drastic action of his own. None of this adds up, and it doesn’t help that <B>the hermetically sealed distinctness of these storylines isolates the three young protagonists from one another</B>. We get no real sense of any interconnectedness between them. The film might as well be three shorts. <B>What <I>12 & Holding</I> most has going for it is some truly fine and notable acting, particularly from the magnetic, wide-eyed Weizenbaum</B> (<I>Memoirs of a Geisha</I>). Malee is the most deeply sketched and proactive of the three main pre-teens here, but she’s also an interesting mixture of naturalistic charm and seasoned aplomb. Even if in the end, the narrative plausibility of her strand too begins to fray, you wish Weizenbaum was holding even more of the movie in her hands. <B>(IFC Films, PG-13, 98 minutes)</B></p>
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