Rob Moretti | Crutch / 2004

understandably confused

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Jacks and Rob Moretti (screenplay), Rob Moretti (director) Crutch / 2004

 

According to the early credits, this film is an autobiographical work based on the experiences of the director. Given that, it is difficult to dismiss the terrifying events suffered by the teenager at the center of this film, David Graham (Eben Gordon), a young man whose father has left their alcoholic mother Katie (Juanita Walsh) primarily in the boy's care since neither his brother or sister seem to motivated enough to help tend to the problems she presents.

      In some respects, David, cooking and caring for the family, makes it appear almost as a normal suburban family, yet it quickly becomes apparent how fragile their life is as the mother alternates her relationship with her son as loving and even somewhat flirtatious with moments of drunken hostility and self-destruction.

 

    At the same time David is experiencing problems with his own sexual identity, and soon falls under the spell of his theater coach, the handsome thirty-some year-old Kenny (played by Moretti), who previously worked as an actor.

      As in too many such situations what begins as simply an interest in his student and an attempt to help David, gradually transforms into a sexual seduction, which quickly escalates into drinking and drugs along with sex.

    Coupled with his problems of his home-life, David increasingly turns to cocaine use and the relationship creates psychological struggles that are far beyond what a young boy such as he can endure.

    In short, Kenny becomes a symbol of man preying on a boy which makes his life even more precarious, as David feels finally rejected by not only his father and, in her illness, his mother, but his lover as well.

    The only difficulty is that the film itself, confused in its own narrative, seems to be unable to substantiate the older man being truly the villain of the piece, and we begin to see David himself using his lover as a kind of crutch to resolve his own problems. Although Kenny does indeed introduce the young man to wine and pot, given that almost all gay teen movies I’ve seen 

show their young heroes engaging in just those activities and in far more dangerous ways, it hardly seems outrageous that the older man presumes his young lover want to share in these activities.

     In fact, when asked Kenny argues that he doesn’t do other drugs, and when David finds cocaine hidden in Kenny’s bathroom cabinet, it is he who steals it and indulges without Kenny’s knowledge.

      Certainly, we might see Kenny’s legal adoption of David as another way to control his young friend, but one might also read it as a real attempt to help and nurture the troubled boy, and if nothing else, protect him since he and his siblings, with the mother institutionalized, are in danger of becoming wards of the state—although the movie does not even mention this possibility. When David begins to spin out of control, mentally and physically, he has already basically left Kenny, perhaps one of the reasons why things have ended so badly for him.

       In short, if the film seems to want to put the blame on a manipulative gay man who gradually engages a younger teen in a world which shifts him from attempting to maintain order in his life into a young man whose life has spun out of control, the film’s narrative suggests something else.

 

     Perhaps David was never actually in control or it may be that the Moretti is simply unable to fully express what he seems to be suggesting, either out of full honesty or lack of cinematic talent.

       Ultimately, although one is truly moved by the autobiographical facts, I have to agree with the reviewer from CinemaSerf, that “although this is clearly a labour of love for the director, it is certainly not for the viewer. The production is basic, at best. The dialogue resorts all too often to expletive-ridden rants that, though they do convey to an extent the frustration of this young man—actually served to lower the already struggling standards of the film. Sure, tell your story—but if you cannot connect with the audience then it becomes and remains little better than a vanity project. The acting here is mediocre, the pacing slow and it is all just a bit too self-indulgent to really engage. It's always a danger when one person controls the entire creative process of a film, and when it is about that person's life experiences too it can—and this one certainly does—lose any sense of objectivity.”

     In the end, I strangely found myself siding with man who the movie seems to want to portray as a sexual abuser, while seeing the central character David as simply a confused kid who gradually lost control of his life for reasons that are much larger than his sexual encounter with an older man.

 

Los Angeles, February 8, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).