The Boys Are Back

Synopsis: Joe Warr (Clive Owen), a British-born sports writer, living and working in Australia, whose wife (Laura Fraser) dies suddenly of cancer, leaving him alone to care for his eight-year old son, Artie (George MacKay). Then Joe's older son from a previous marriage, Harry (Nicolas McAnulty), arrives from England and Joe finds himself juggling work commitments and the expectations of two emotionally-needy offspring.

Scott Hicks knows how to make an attractively packaged, middle-of-the-road film (his greatest success to date has been the considerably over-rated Shine (1996) and The Boys are Back, which is  based on U.K. sportswriter Simon Carr's autobiographical novel about a sports journalist who is suddenly saddled with the responsibility of raising two sons from different marriages, is no exception. Even more so than usual, this time, particularly after the opening act which deals with Joe's loss, Hicks overloads his inherently substantial material with conventional directorial choices and a level of sentimentality that it does not deserve.

Owen, who was also an executive producer, gives an appealing performance and the difficulties of single parenting offers potential for a dramatically impactful film but Hicks’ packages it in such a way that (thanks to the limpid cinematography by Greig Fraser) more often the film lingers on the charms South Australia’s wine growing region, where Joe just happens to live, than engages with the realities of Joe's situation. This is compounded by Joe’s relationship with a conveniently responsive and attractive single mother (Emma Booth), sign-posted from their first encounter, all eyes aflirty, and the presence of Julia Blake who is rolled out to play for the umpteenth time a still-attractive senior citizen, Joe’s mother in-law. If both of these characters are symptomatic of Hicks’s fondness for the photogenic, screenwriter Allan Cubitt’s attempts to invest them with more than merely pictorial value does not come off, both of them unconvincingly turning on Joe when he is called to Melbourne on an assignment.

Whilst the relationship between Joe and his boys, one traumatized by his mother’s death, the other by Joe's departure many years earlier is the film’s central concern Hicks spends too much time with familiar scenes of bonding (water pistol fights, pillow fights and general dare-deviltry and not enough on the real emotional difficulties that Joe has to face. Interludes in which his dead wife appears to him and gives him sage counsel only compound the problem. Frankly Joe’s children are so obnoxious that Owen’s equanimity beggars belief. And here you have it, the film just doesn't feel true to life. The Boys Are Back is a glossily sentimentalized story of bereavement and healing. Fine, if that's all you expect of a film but this material deserved better.

FYI: For a film that deals with similar subject-matter in a less conventionalized, more sophisticated way see Michael Winterbottom’s Genova, released the same year.

 

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