June 14, 2002 | The name of the movie is The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, and the first thing you need to do is wipe that smirk off your face. No, it’s not about what you think it is. In fact, the only priest on view here, played by Vincent D’Onofrio, is guilty of nothing more scandalous than chain-smoking.
The altar boys are slightly naughtier, but also a great deal funnier, in this amusing and engaging slice of seriocomic nostalgia. Based on an autobiographical coming-of-age novel by Chris Fuhrman, who passed away shortly before it was published, Dangerous Lives takes us back to the early 1970s, and reacquaints us with a wondrously and painfully uncertain stage of life that, truth to tell, many of us – perhaps most of us? – would like to forget.
“Adolescence,” French filmmaker Francois Truffaut once said, “leaves pleasant memories only for adults who cannot remember.” Director Peter Care and screenwriter Jeff Stockwell, the creative forces behind this movie, might not completely agree. But they obviously know what Truffaut was talking about.
At a strict Catholic school in a mid-size Southern town – the book was set in Savannah, but the movie isn’t that specific – buddies Francis (Emile Hirsch) and Tim (Kieran Culkin) count themselves among a small cadre of guerilla warriors opposed to the forces of authority.
Along with a couple of like-minded but not-so-audacious friends, they invent comic-book heroes to serve as their alter egos in an ongoing war against Nunzilla – i.e., Sister Assumpta (Jodie Foster – yes, that Jodie Foster), the authoritarian headmistress whose prosthetic leg has earned her the nickname of Peg-Leg. Cartoonist Todd McFarlane of Spawn fame created the animated sequences in which the larger-than-life good guys battle Nunzilla and her legion, and those scenes are among the best in the film. But in what passes for real life during Dangerous Lives, Francis and Tim find themselves in even more perilous situations.
We don’t learn a lot about the families of either boy, which is one of the film’s major shortcomings. For that matter, we don’t learn much about their attitudes toward religion, except for what we can glean from their antipathy toward Sister Assumpta, and their rather rude treatment of an immense religious statue that they kidnap from their school.
But Francis learns much more about life than he can easily assimilate during his shy courtship of Margie (Jena Malone), a lovely classmate with a painful secret. And Tim learns that some daydreams are best not realized, especially when those fantasies involve drugging a zoo-caged cougar with cough syrup and transporting the beast to the office of his least favorite nun.
Care prepared for Dangerous Lives, his feature-filmmaking debut, by directing music videos and TV commercials, but don’t hold that against him. Unlike most other directors with similar backgrounds, Care doesn’t feel the need for quick-cut visual hyperbole – except during the cartoon sequences, of course – and he’s attentive to the delicate and disparate rhythms of jokey conversations, angry confrontations and tearful revelations.
Scenes in which the adolescent boys share acquired bits of dubious sexual lore ring just as true as the more intensely dramatic moments. And the performances by Hirsch, Culkin and especially Malone are convincing and compelling. Foster, who co-produced the movie, somehow finds a layer of emotional truth beneath the caricature of her supporting role. D’Onofrio isn’t given nearly enough to do – his fleeting scenes appear to be building toward a climactic payoff that never materializes – but he, too, keeps it real.
