Hidden depths
ABOUT A BOY
Cert. PG
Money can't buy you love. Or happiness. 50 years into the West's affluenza epidemic we are beginning to recognise that wealth can destroy just as much as it can comfort.
The realisation has been a long time coming but now it's here, we see articles, books, documentaries and films about it. We've started fishing beneath the surface of prosperity, trawling for meaning.
By this reckoning the film 'About a Boy' is quite a catch. Hugh Grant plays Will Freeman, an idle, wealthy thirty-something, with a wholly self-centred existence and a flat full of gadgets instead of a soul. By accident of his plan to prey on attractive single mothers for casual sex, he ends up entangled with Marcus, a 12-year-old boy with considerably greater reserves of wisdom, courage and sincerity.
Will slowly discovers his own hidden depths, a capacity for generosity, to care about others, to act for their benefit rather than his own. Marcus, in return, benefits from lessons in style, an extended social network and a refuge from his obsessive, depressive mother.
We've started fishing beneath the surface of prosperity, trawling for meaning...
The film, coming as it does from the perceptive pen of Nick Hornby, is a welcome antidote to contemporary cynicism and self-interest. Its 'messages' - that people are made for relationships and that courage and self-sacrifice are the only means to achieve this - are thoroughly good news.
But its weakness is that it sanitises the alternatives. Will's decision to exploit vulnerable single mums for sex is a bit naughty. Marcus' unpopularity and bullying at school is unpleasant rather than devastating. His mother's suicide attempt is merely a foil for plot development. Ultimately, everybody is quite nice. Shallow perhaps. Unpleasant even. But, at the end of the day, pretty sound.
A gritty, harrowing tale of redemption would have made a rather less feel-good - and less financially successful - film. Maybe that's too cynical - 'About a Boy' does at least find a species of biblical humanity in our hidden depths. But those depths hold other, less agreeable qualities and no redemption will ever be truly appreciated without facing up to those qualities.
'About a Boy' affirms our humanity, for which it deserves our praise. But it does so at the cost of playing down our inhumanity.
Nick Spencer
This review first appeared as one of The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity's weekly emails, and is used with permission. To subscribe to LICC's emails, contact: mail@licc.org.uk
