Shared Darkness

12 & Holding, which opens this week and expands in arthouse venues across the nation in June.

A quirky tale centering around three 12-year-olds who lose a brother and friend at the hands of two older kids in an unfortunate bullying incident gone wrong, the movie examines the fashion in which these pre-teens cope with grief and other altered circumstances, especially as they run into parents who either suppress, discourage or can’t fully cope with the new ways in which they act out. Zoë Weizenbaum, who played the young Pumpkin in Memoirs of a Geisha, gives a memorably remarkable performance as Malee, a young girl who develops an inappropriate crush on one of the patients, Gus Maitland (Jeremy Renner), of her therapist mother.

“I had some apprehension about the movie just because of the things that (Malee) does,” admits Weizenbaum. But the director, Michael Cuesta (L.I.E.), “explained to me that she’s a really lonely and confused girl, going through all these changes, and her mother is really disconnected from her. It’s an emotional rollercoaster going through puberty and being a teenager, and when you don’t have support it makes it a lot worse. She doesn’t have a father figure (and) she looks to Jeremy as someone to talk to, but I guess she approaches it in the wrong way. She’s just really confused and lonely. It’s sad, what she does.”

What Malee does includes an awkward, attempted seduction — a scene difficult for any actress, but especially one only 14 years of age. “The disrobing scene was done really tastefully,” says Weizenbaum, “and working with Jeremy I basically didn’t have any nerves when it came to doing the scene because of how buddy-buddy we were and how professional he was.” Adds Renner: “Zoë is just so smart and giving, and it’s very easy to like and adore her. I didn’t have to be patient, which I thought I might have to be working with someone younger. She’s probably more professional than I am. She’s just a gem to work with, she felt like family.”

While the Malee-Gus arc is the film’s strongest, it isn’t home to the only interesting, naturalistic adolescent performance. Like Weizenbaum, Montreal native Jesse Camacho — who plays Leonard, a pudgy kid who attempts to reform his family’s eating habits when he loses his sense of taste — won his role after sending in scenes of himself on tape. Cuesta “said I was very natural,” relates Camacho. “I had done these sit-ups in one of the scenes, and apparently those really helped me land the role because they weren’t very good.” No worries — nobody will be saying the same thing about Camacho’s screen work, or that of any of his 12 & Holding peers.