Jonathan Wald | What Grown-Ups Know / 2004

a territory for which even grown-ups have no words

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jonathan Wald (screenwriter and director) What Grown-Ups Know / 2004 [30 minutes]

 

Perhaps the most complex of the five movies upon which I’m focusing is Jonathan Wald’s What Grown-Ups Know. In this film the young boy, Roy (Stephen James King), is quite obviously aware of, if not at all experienced about, his gay sexual orientation. Traveling with his mother, Elizabeth (Susie Lindeman) after they have just escaped without paying from a cheap motel, they make a pit stop at a public restroom, he scouting out the men’s room, about to engage in sex with an older man in a cubicle before she, impatient to know what’s holding him up, intervenes by pounding on the men’s room door.

      Their next stop is what is called in Australia—the film’s location—a “caravan park,” the rooms consisting of older trailers which obviously attract patrons who plan to stay on for a few weeks or months. At such places, accordingly, a deposit is required, which Elizabeth and Roy clearly cannot provide. His mother, frustrated by the situation, is about to turn and run again, but Roy, worn out by their endless travels and recognizing the manager as the same one he encountered at the truck stop bathroom, has a better idea. He puts himself up as a deposit, promising to remain at the camp while his mother looks for jobs; obviously, she won’t try to run off without paying with her son as bond.

      Roy apparently also has other plans in store, and can hardly wait the next morning to try to seduce the caravan hotel manager, whose name we later discover is Maurice (Daniel Roberts). That first morning the boy remains in bed naked waiting for the manager to come clean their unit; but his act of seduction doesn’t pay off, as the manager retires until he dresses.

       By the second day his mother has found a freakish job as a female Santa, Roy once more trying to hurry her off to work so that he might try his luck with Maurice. This time he strips down to his swimming suit standing by the side of a lake in which, so he is told by the manager, it is too dangerous to swim, perhaps a metaphor for the relationship he is trying to develop between them. As the two talk further, moreover, it is clear Maurice is quite aware of Roy’s sexual invitations, but like Tom in Birthday Time is wary of taking the boy into his bed; moreover, there is simply a great amount of daily work to be done in keep the motel in operation.

      There is also the problem of the mother. Elizabeth suspects what may be going on and forbids her son to go near the man she claims may be a “pervert.” And, although, given her childlike behavior her demands might be easy to ignore, in her implorations and near-sexual control of her son she is a powerful force on his life. More importantly, it is clear that she is dying of cancer. We gradually discover that the horrible blonde wig she is wearing is an attempt to cover up her baldness, a result of chemotherapy. In fact, the reason she has left Roy’s father—to whom the boy keeps insisting they return—has to do with the man’s rejection, physically and mentally, of his wife after her diagnosis. Having stolen his car, he has canceled her credit cards. Despite the boy’s pleas that they go back home, accordingly, she feels she cannot return to a man who longer will help her survive or support her mentally while she is dying.

     In his gentle ministrations, her son has become her symbolic husband, who she now treats almost like a sexual partner.

     It is the demands of both the maternal—and because of his sexual desire and absence of his own father—the paternal that is tearing apart what is left of Roy’s childhood. As he admits to Maurice, despite his actual age which is perhaps somewhere between 16 and 18, he is now too “old” for school.

     When Roy sneaks into the office drawers of the manager, he discovers photos of the man with a child, obviously Maurice’s son. And a later conversation subtly reveals, if you can read between the lines, that Maurice’s wife also long ago left him probably having discovered his closeted homosexuality and apparently accusing him—wrongly so Maurice asserts to Roy without naming the crime—of child abuse, winning custody of her son.

     The pulls on both Maurice and Roy, accordingly, are just too strong for either of them to overcome, and they ultimately do find themselves in bed together, Maurice shocked to discover it is the boy’s first time. Yet he is clearly a gentle teacher, and Roy is suddenly joyful about the possibility of staying on with him.

      But it is just at this moment that his mother—having been too sick to report to her job for a couple of days and after having offered her wedding ring as a deposit that might free her son from performing that role—insists they move on. When Roy adamantly resists, she begins packing and lugging her heavy suitcase to the car herself, declaring she will leave him at the caravan if he refuses to immediately leave with her.

      Even Maurice has attempted to explain to Roy that he cannot replace his father and that he should move on with his mother. The boy has no choice but to accept his mother’s vagabond proposals.

      If you previously thought you comprehended just how difficult it is for a teenage boy to sexually “come out,” you need now to recalculate. Roy’s heart and mind may be absolutely willing, but the patterns his mother has imposed upon his life makes it a nearly impossible task. For him there is no possibility of “normality,” not even a potentially “different” one. He might as well be a child prostitute on the streets which is almost the role he has attempted to play at this last stand. Where they go from here is unimaginable territory for which even grown-ups have no words.

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review May 2021).