Hallam Foe (2007)

People are voting emotionally.

Absolutely the worst movie.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The eponymous Hallam is quickly established as a creepy, totally self-obsessed, loser. One who treats everyone with contempt. One who speaks to his father and step-mother in a way that deserves a good slap that never comes. Instead he is indulged for god knows why and consequently I didn't care about him, his dysfunctional family or his boo-hoo poor me plight.There is nothing wrong with the art direction or the acting. Both are of a higher caliber than one expects from a cheapo Brit movie. No, it's the characters and plot that stink.A character based drama should have characters you are interested in even if you don't like like them. I wasn't intrigued, I was offended. How long before I switched off? Probably 15 minutes -- the gruesome assignation up in the tree house between step-mother and son was the last straw. Life is too short to suffer tripe like this.

HALLAM FOE is a good name for a story about being the enemy of your own peace. I wish the movie were as good. In the pantheon of coming of age fairy tales, there is no more common theme than the Oedipal; it's easy, and easy to screw up. David Mackenzie doesn't completely screw this one up until the end, but he does take a lot of convenient outs along the way, some handed him by Peter Jinks and others invented with Ed Whitmore. Start with a boy whose dead mother obsession turns his anger on, yes, a wicked stepmother, whom he sleeps with at the first opportunity, which is I suppose one way to revenge himself. But the deed only sends him careening off to find a better mother figure, this time a dead ringer - which brings us to another really easy choice: Mom's doppelganger is an HR chief who immediately and not very credibly hires him so that he can have less trouble stalking her. When she finds out that he spends most of his time glued to her windows with binoculars, she's more willing than most victimized girls to give him second and third chances to explain himself. So Oedipus gets to sleep with two surrogate mothers, but in attacking his surrogate and real fathers, he inflicts only minor wounds that are not very satisfying to him nor to me. The whole movie is like that. There are many missed opportunities (like a real consequence for anybody's actions), red herrings (like a maybe suspicious/maybe not pair of third act crutches) and dead ends (whatever happened to his voyeurism? and where did it come from, for that matter?).Oh well. As David Mackenzie movies go, at least it's no YOUNG ADAM. It is enormously less repellent and makes slightly more sense than that, and there are compensations: Claire Forlani, looking more severe than usual, and Sophia Myles, bringing some reality to a ridiculous role, and Ciaran Hinds and Ewen Bremner and Maurice Roeves, who are never less than perfect. Plus a resourceful and occasionally charming Oedipus, well played by the increasingly interesting Jaime Bell. And within its limitations the movie is intermittently, almost consistently engaging and enjoyable... until it winds up down by the loch, in a graceless calm-after-the-sturm und drang revelation that patly solves everyone's problems except mine.

David Mackenzie's follow-up to the brilliant Young Adam wants to be a feel-good underdog story of a lonely voyeur who is trying to confront some psycho-sexual issues with his dead mother. It wants to be gritty, realistic, and mysterious. At the same time, it wants to be funny and nonjudgmental of its disturbed lead as he establishes himself as an adult.To meet this end, the film tries hard to be youthful. Its poster has hand-drawn letters looking like that of Juno. Its original soundtrack is comprised of fast-paced indie rock which tries to convince the audience that Hallam is OK; just a little misguided. But strangely the film is anything but youthful.Like Young Adam this film's central mystery concerns a drowned woman- in this case Hallam's mother. Young Adam keeps its mystery quiet, contemplative, and paced well enough to hit you with the truths as they come. Hallam Foe does the opposite. It foregrounds its character's psychosis so clearly and so early that he never really does anything outside his expected parameters. The opening scene is Hallam in his treehouse watching his sister fooling around with her boyfriend. Hallam swiftly interrupts, asserting his presence in the household. Here we see everything that Hallam will do for the rest of the movie.The mystery surrounding his mother's drowning is whether it was suicide or murder by his father's girlfriend. The audience can never really trust Hallam because, besides being creepy, we think his obsession has led him close to insanity. This hindered the mystery element for me because Hallam is too sporadic to be relatable. Right when he's found some clues that would support his claim he runs away from home, at first it appearing to be looking for the police. Then he gets extremely sidetracked by a girl who resembles his mother, which frustratingly leads the story away from the mystery element.While Jamie Bell does bring out some very endearing traits in his lost character, he was limited by the obviousness of his psychological needs. This movie is in no way mysterious, yet it is not blunt either. It tries to be realistic in dealing with such issues, but it adds a very self-conscious spunk which registers itself as quite the opposite. It goes for a soundtrack-heavy, Trainspotting attitude to help the audience root for a protagonist who scales buildings, picks locks, and camps out for the sake of voyeurism. These urban peeping tom adventures Hallam engages in are way too difficult for an inward-drawn country boy to engage in and they are not sexy, giddy, or pleasant. They are more neutral than anything; not propelling the character or story. Mackenzie makes you understand Hallam, yet he fails to build common ground.He expects you to enjoy Hallam's trials and tribulations without much ideological justification. The film hinges on its audience's perspective on voyeurism/the kind of person who engages in it. Obviously, most people would be disgusted by it. And Hallam Foe realizes that, but it does not let us see Hallam weigh the morality of his decisions. He goes from person to person, trying to fill his deep void. There is a particularly disturbing line from Hallam's love interest Kate where she drunkenly says "I love creepy boys," perhaps asking the audience to do the same. The line tries to foreshadow her understanding of him (her motivation remains vague throughout) and tries to further us from judging him. It's not hard to like Hallam, but it is very hard to participate in his adventure- if it is even an adventure at all. All the while, the film tries to use its flamboyant soundtrack to mask its indecisive mood.Great performances are weighed down by a film with a weak third act, muddy development, and needlessly ambiguous direction from Mackenzie. Recently this film was re-named for a US release, and for what reason? Not only is it more unappealing, but the hard truth is that the Hallam character never earns the title 'mister.'

Mister Foe is another "indie coming of age dramedy" with a hip indie soundtrack about a charismatic teen with psychological problems. Hallam is a film about a boy who misses his dead mother and ends up striking up a relationship with a women who looks like her. Normally films handle the Oedipus complex a little tactfully but Mister Foe goes right for it and pulls no punches. Even after they set it up they go to the well once too often. Each character has a broadly drawn idea of their personality but we never get a sense of who they are. The fact that both of them have such emotional baggage is what is supposed to make it interesting, but they have that baggage because the film says they do. The baggage exists to create the characters and not that characters exist because of the baggage. At the end the character development seems to serve the plot more the the characters themselves. The best parts of this film is the voyeurism angle and even that seems to get lost in the shuffle and even downplayed to other aspects like a weak and unnecessary family drama in addition to a murder mystery that it seems even David Mackenzie tries to downplay and holds off as long as he can. Jamie Bell does give a great performance as Hallam playing a somber yet energetic teenager even if he doesn't have much to work with. David Mackenzie also does a great job of framing the film with some beautiful backdrops and backgrounds. It seems his weakest aspect is filming characters as his character moments are flat and uninteresting with the backgrounds being what gives it flare. Mister Foe is a character study of caricatures. It is fun and odd but at the same time shallow.