Jaime Travis | The Saddest Boy in the World / 2006

the justification for suicide

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jaime Travis (screenwriter and director) The Saddest Boy in the World / 2006 [13 minutes]

 

How can one express utter joy and admiration for a film that begins and ends with a young possibly gay, 9-year-old boy about to hang himself? Even if we observe that Canadian director Jaimie Travis’ film The Saddest Boy in the World—much like Canadian director Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World—is not a realist work. Telling its tale within the context of the various traditions of absurdist black comedy, the travails of young Timothy Higgins (Benjamin B. Smith) are just close enough to life that they chafe the funny bone.

 

    Timothy, small for his age, is surrounded by seemingly normal folk, his tap-dancing Baby Jane of a sister, Isabelle (Hailey Conner), a mother (Lauren K. Robek) who wears stylish cocktail dresses to entertain a party for his mean-spirited classmates who make his daily school-life nearly impossible. Tim has never once found a seat when playing “musical chairs.” When it comes to pick the teams for basketball, everyone, including the boy in a wheelchair is chosen but Tim. The biggest and fattest boy of the class tortures our diminutive hero by forcing him to kneel at the urinals for long periods of time. The  terrible twins (Danika and Paige Martin) mock him. And when his mother seeks the help of a child psychiatrist for her unhappy son—"the saddest boy in the world,” as he describes himself to his mom—he alienates her immediately by identifying each image of the Rorschach Test as a butterfly. The pills she prescribes for him have a side effect that allows him to hear the voices of all effigies of animals in his home repeating “Kill yourself.”

         At one point Timothy is kidnapped by a strange man, and fliers go flying throughout the city on walls and on every milk cartoon displaying the small, good-looking child gone missing. His mother, he tells us, being a single-wage earner is unable to pay the ransom. We see her merrily chomping on her Grapenuts cereal with her favorite child, Isabelle looking not the least bit concerned that someone is gone missing from their breakfast table.

       Not to worry, the kidnapper soon drops the boy off where he picked him up, evidently spray-painting the word HOMO across the wall where the missing boy fliers have been posted en masse before he drives away.

       And I forgot to tell you, Timmy’s pet rabbits, salt and pepper, his lovely bird, and his cat have gone missing. His only friend, an Asian child, has been deported.   

      Is it any wonder that after having gathered together all of those who have maltreated him through the years for his ninth birthday party, that this tiny Tim refuses to blow out his candle, asks to be excused from the table to visit the bathroom, and retreats instead to his oddly green-colored bedroom and sticks his head in the noose he has long ago prepared for this day.

   

     He is distracted by the sound of ringing bells, and, after pulling away the rope, momentarily pulls out his piggy bank to take out its content before exiting through the front door to head for the ice cream truck parked on the street in front of his house; but as he almost reaches his goal, the truck speeds away. He turns back in utter resignation only the see every single birthday celebrant, including his mother and sister, licking their delicious looking ice cream cones.

 

     What choice does he have? He returns to his room and puts his head back into the noose as the film goes black.

      Sadly, The Saddest Boy in the World is great fun, representing volume two in Travis’ comic trilogy of the saddest children, the other two titled Why the Anderson Children Didn't Come to Dinner—a film about the rebellion of a mother’s children—and The Armoire—which concerns the permanent disappearance of a young boy’s friend while playing hide-and-go-seek with him.

 

Los Angeles, January 4, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022).