By Armond White

Son of Rambow
Directed by Garth Jennings


Two lonely, pre-adolescent British teens in 1983 form a friendship in Son of Rambow after one shows the other Sylvester Stallone’s rugged, survivalist antics in the action movie First Blood. But these kids are characters themselves: Will (Bill Milner), raised in a strict religious sect that forbids movies or TV, uncannily resembles a pre-teen Wes Anderson. His instinct for movies shows in graphomaniac scribblings, turning his Bible into a coloring book. And he fantasizes avenging his father’s death. Joshua (Neil Dudgeon), a fatherless hellion, looks like that pugnacious, cigar-smoking kid in Disney’s Pinocchio who first spouts a tail and donkey ears. Together, Will and Joshua remake First Blood with an early-model camcorder.

Like Michel Gondry, director of the DIY comedy, Be Kind Rewind, Son of Rambow director Garth Jennings first made his name in music video (the extraordinary REM clip “Imitation of Life” showed his gift for inventive special effects). A similar, satirical vision of the world enlivened Jennings’ debut feature A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But Jennings’ music-video-cultivated sense of the fantastic is less philosophical than Gondry’s—and less surreal. Son of Rambow turns unfortunately insular and maudlin (Jennings also wrote the script) about the desperate sources of its boyhood outcasts’ imaginations. Even when enlisting kids at their school to help out in the remake, the amateur endeavor never becomes wild, subversive or original.

Gondry understands pop as a form of social resistance, and he loves it all; while Jennings seems to be making an appeal to the hipster notion of pop—chuckling about First Blood, yet overloading it with cultural significance. Even Jennings’ amplified soundtrack is inventively animated. But it’s hard to make the leap from Stallone’s American jingoism to a nascent British graphic artist’s developing pop whimsy.

As Will and Joshua pursue backyard auteurism, Son of Rambow shifts inconsistently from Gondryesque movie lore to evoking a more credible milieu of ’80s British pop music. A sixth form (equivalent to U.S. middle school) free-for-all convenes all grade-level students in recess/celebration; the kids bobble to late Siouxsie and the Banshees, Gary Numan, The Cure and Depeche Mode. This dance mix seems borrowed rather than authentic. Where’s The Smiths? More precisely, Jennings misses the emotional connection between social realism and pop music—that’s what was genius about Jared Hess using “The Promise” in Napoleon Dynamite.

Jennings’ cartoon-graphics F/X recall the hallucinatory outpourings in the movie Secret Lives of Altar Boys but through randomness these threaten to become just Peter Jackson–type whimsy. Son of Rambow never quite conveys how pop becomes the outlet that saves Will from his restrictive home life, Joshua from his family neglect or made Jennings an artist. Rhyming images of a classroom TV-monitor followed by a fishbowl, Will and Joshua’s palsy embrace followed by an alabaster statue of Damon and Pythias are clever—but only that.
Son of Rambow’s main theme—how cinema culture unleashes sensual experience, encouraging anarchy, rebellion and affection—is repeated in the subplot about a visiting French student’s impact on Will and Joshua’s classmates (a nifty domino-chain of students light-up the French kid’s cigarette). Maybe next time Jennings will personalize his link in that chain and his place in that tradition.