Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
Directed by Roberto Faenza
BASED ON THE NOVEL by Peter Cameron, the movie Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is a curious hybrid of international film financing and American “indie” narrative style. The story deals with a teenage boy from the hip urban haute bourgeoisie living somewhere in Manhattan or Brooklyn’s chic bohemia, but the film was directed by an Italian, Roberto Faenza, who also co-wrote the screenplay. The result is an odd Italian-American hybrid production. While the location shoot is authentic, the visual atmosphere lacks the aura of a “New York film” film à la Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen. With the exception of a few fleeting scenes, Faenza’s New York might as well be set in Toronto.
As a novel, the rap on Someday is that it’s a kind of update on Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. As a film, the dialogue by a disaffected teenager who can talk smart-aleck reminds me more of the recent movie Juno (2007). As it is, the young British actor Toby Regbo in the central role of James Sveck delivers the “Holden Caulfield” voice-over, and his embittered aperçus wear thin. The movie starts with James peering over the edge of a brownstone rooftop, apparently preparing to commit suicide. He’s interrupted by a cab pulling up to the front curb. James’s mother emerges, calling after him and his sister Gillian from the street. Mother’s unexpected return from her aborted third honeymoon provides the necessary detour for James’ plan to off himself. Regbo, pretty and slender, is in nearly every frame of the movie—and, good as he is as an actor, there lies the problem. He interacts with all the characters—family, friends, nemeses, and the passing oddball—but none of these characters ever interacts with each other. Teenage angst is often a form of narcissism, and here the movie literally revolves around one teenager whose world, while sophisticated, seems narrow, small, and, like its protagonist, intensely self-absorbed. This should have worked better, given the bona fides of the movie’s cast. As his thrice-married mother, Oscar-winner Marcia Gay Harden plays James’ mother Marjorie, a world-weary cosmopolite who owns a trendy art gallery, presumably in West Chelsea or Soho. Harden manages to create something human despite too few scenes of emotional depth. James’ father Paul, a smug skirt-chaser played with cheery bonhomie by Peter Gallagher, works in a skyscraper with commanding views, so he is presumably a financial Master of the Universe. Gallagher makes Paul a man too intellectually meager to deserve our scorn yet also too insecurely vain at middle age—he’s planning an eyelift—not to elicit our laughter and sympathy. As James’ grandmother, living in a cozy country home, the always estimable Ellen Burstyn bestows a rather beatific, bohemian grace on the role of Nanette. I might have preferred her giving this granny a bit of the nutty off-kilter qualities that she gave to her drug-addled role in Requiem for a Dream. As it is, Burstyn plays an awfully sensible and un-shockable grandmother—the one true grounded adult in James’ family. These characters, and several secondary ones, interesting and off-beat as they are, only intermittently manage to make the narrative come alive. Among the eccentrics are James’ sister Gillian, played by True Blood’s Debora Ann Woll, a college student having an affair with a married middle-aged professor, a roué from somewhere in Mitteleuropa. At 23, Gillian is already planning to write her memoirs. There is also Marjorie’s recently deserted third husband, played by Stephen Lang, usually a paragon of mature machismo, but here depicting a gambling addict and emotional loser. Finally, there is John, Marjorie’s gallery manager, a sophisticated and handsome black man (Gilbert Owuor), who eventually becomes the object of James’ inchoate gay attentions. The queer subtext has already been hinted at when James’ father, over lunch, disconcerted that the boy has ordered only a salad, lowers his voice and asks James, with liberal East Coast brio, if he’s gay. While the core mystery of James’ unhappiness has something to do with an incident referred to as “Washington, DC,” we follow him around in his separate encounters with these satellite figures. Nothing quite adheres dramatically until James, at his mother’s suggestion, reluctantly agrees to see a therapist—excuse me, a “life coach”—played with quiet grace by Lucy Liu, giving what might have been a laughable New Age stereotype a measure of gravitas. She draws him out, allowing us to discover the shaming incident that James experienced on one of those high school leadership trips in the company of a busload of teenage high achievers and a couple of hipster bullies. But while these few scenes are credibly staged, hinting at the loneliness and pain of a worldly teenager, they cannot make up for the lack of narrative momentum or emotional charge that might have clicked had Faenza stuck closer to the novel and its structure. Instead, he’s assembled a series of episodes whose center doesn’t quite hold.
