everything’s going to be okay
by Douglas Messerli
Chris Coats (screenwriter and director) Good
Boy / 2015 [15 minutes]
US director Chris Coats graduated from the
University of California, Santa Barbara before joining up with the production
company originally headed by actor Heath Ledger and Matt Amato, The Masses. In
2015 he made the troubling and moving film about toxic masculinity, Good Boy.
Macon (Frank Martinelli) and his father Scott (Cliff Weissman) have just
driven in from Flagstaff to the Yucca Desert to celebrate Macon’s boyhood
friend Caleb’s (Nicholas Tucci) return home from the military. As they come to
a stop at house, Macon is still having evident nightmares about a day long ago
which becomes the central motif in Coats’ film. Evidently, the high school boys
Macon and Caleb were out in the desert, dressed in mock army fatigues, to
engage in a paintball battle, joined by Caleb’s younger brother Eli (Jance
Enslin) and his friend Quinn (Eric Unger), both of whom seem far less
interested in the battlefield game than in each other.
As
Macon awakens, his father reassures him that they will only stay a couple of
hours, reminding him that Caleb was his closet friend.
Besides Caleb has stalked off the backyard, his sister Kel (Toni
Christopher) asking Macon if he could go talk with him since he’s clearly “in a
mood.” Their conversation set against the desert backdrop and their attempt to
play darts is not truly fulfilling to either of them, as Caleb—desperate for
some weed—recounts past times such as the night when seeking out pot they
encountered a mean man working Macon’s father, and ended up drinking a whole
bottle of cough syrup as a substitution drug, returning home scared and sick,
only to observe Eli sitting on the front porch with a whole bag of marijuana.
Caleb confronts his brother, and the two fight, Eli storming off after
slugging Caleb, his friend disappearing in the violent confrontation.
Back at the reunion, Caleb finally comes back inside to confront his
father and the others for keeping all the junk of his childhood, including
maintaining Eli’s room exactly as it was the day he disappeared, never to
return home. The sister has followed up leads, she tells Macon, even traveling
the year before, 15 years after Eli’s disappearance, to Oklahoma based on a
lead.
As Scott calls out that it’s time for them to leave, Macon joins Caleb
in Eli’s old room as the soldier recounts his memory of a maneuver in which it
appeared that death was upon him. The old wives’ tale about recalling all the
major moments of one’s own life isn’t true, he argues, since all he could
conjure up were scenes from his brother’s life. And suddenly he saw the boy, in
Hawaii perhaps, having breakfast with his boyfriend, without ever knowing that
his older brother Caleb had now died.
As Caleb recounts his sad tale about his lost brother, he suddenly
realizes that Macon is also in tears as they well up in his eyes and stream
down his cheek. Macon stands, called again by his father, to leave, Caleb
looking strangely at him and momentarily following him out into the hall with a
strange look of sudden perception on his face.
In the truck again, Macon begins a sentence, “Why did you….” which his
father immediately interrupts, repeating what he must have dozens of times
throughout the years: “Listen to me. You’d of regretted it Macon, you would.
Our life would be gone. You’re a good man, Macon. You made a mistake, but
you’re good man. I need you to believe me. I need to hear it when I say it.”
The pound of a percussive instrument in Rebecca Calinsky’s effective
score clicks and bangs as the father repeats these words—the delusions of all
violent murderers who excuse their actions through the notion of protecting
their own heteronormative values. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
Obviously, for neither Caleb or Macon, things are not okay. Their lives
have been emptied in the absence of Eli from the young love and non-violent
values he daily reminds them of, emotions these men appear to be unable to find
in their own lives.
Coats’ short film is a powerful testament to how homophobic
violence—perhaps violence of any kind—forever alters the lives of not just the
abused but any abuser with a conscience equally.
The director himself observes of his film: “It was my intent to create
this intensely masculine environment in order to show just how fragile that
masculinity can be. It’s a mask that men are made to wear and act upon,
repressing other aspects that they consider weak but which in reality, make a
person whole. When that mask eventually falls away, what’s underneath is angry,
frightened, and underdeveloped like an animal, blind because it’s lived in the
dark its whole life, having never been exposed to the light.”
Los Angeles, June 15, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June
2023).
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