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Nathan Varnson takes kid brother Ryan Jones for a ride in 'Hide Your Smiling Faces'
(TRIBECA)
Awkward teenage boys wandering around a quiet small town. Dark wet woods, abandoned shacks and dead animals. Angry enigmatic adults and lots of staring off into space.
Is "Hide Your Smiling Faces" a new movie? Or just outtakes from an old Terrence Malick one?
The film, which picked up some rapturous reviews on the festival circuit, is certainly serious, nicely scored and well (if dimly) shot. Yet there's very little life here — it's all atmosphere and no air.
Written and directed by Daniel Patrick Carbone from Newton, and shot mostly in rural Jersey, the film is set in a time (or at least in a parallel world) where there are no smartphones, videogames or even TV.
Instead the town's kids — and weirdly, in this town, they're nearly all boys — spend the summer wandering around, riding their bicycles, wrestling each other and getting into trouble. Until one of them shows up, mysteriously, dead.
Which seems poised to push the film towards some sort of conflict. But instead, just mires it in more moody wondering as the two main characters, brothers Eric and Tommy, now stumble around puzzling about life and death and other mysteries.
Like, maybe, where all this is going.
Perhaps I have less interest in these sorts of dreamy childhood stories than most (I was one of the few critics who also disliked the similar, widely lauded "George Washington"). Or maybe I just have a strong enough memory of rude, grubby childhood itself to see how faux-poetic these nostalgic musings are.
But unlike Malick's "Tree of Life," which actually grappled with issues like grace and forgiveness and the destruction of innocence, "Hide Your Smiling Faces" is metaphor sans message — just endless scenes of young Nathan Varnson and Ryan Jones riding their bikes around, poking dead animals with sticks and looking up at the sun.
If it looks like a lot of nothing, the movie's own website would beg to differ. "As the two brothers vocally face the questions they have about mortality," it explains, "they simultaneously hold their own silent debates within their minds that build into seemingly insurmountable moral peaks."
Oh, well, OK then.
The film (Nicholas Bentgen is the cinematographer) looks lovely, Carbone gets some natural performances from his young cast and there are a few magical moments — the scene, which opens the film, of a snake slowly engulfing its prey, or a moment when a clueless boy decides to practice his kissing skills through a piece of plastic.
But it's not just these children's smiling faces that are hidden here — it's everything that might make you want to search out the meaning behind them.
Ratings note: The film contains violence.
Directed by Daniel Patrick Carbone. With Nathan Varnson, Ryan Jones. Now playing in New York.
★ ★