Too much independent attitude and too little insight

A school shoot is such a cataclysmic event that any attempt to dramatize the consequences of a definition is, by definition, a film to be taken seriously. That said, there is a good way to make one. “Mass”, the drama of Sundance 2021 in which four parents met in an anteroom of the church for a painfully cathartic meeting session (two of them were the parents of a victim; two were the parents of the shooter), was a film that traveled a delicate rope. It was compact and graceful, painful and enlightening.

“Eric Larue”, produced by actor Michael Shannon, is built around a similar situation, because she clashes towards a confrontation between the mother of a school shooter and the mothers of the three classmates he killed. But instead of attacking the question at hand, almost all scenees are weighed down by an attitude of a floating independent film and sometimes boring intrusive.

Take the places in which Janice Larue (Judy Greer), the mother of the shooter, returns to work in the Quincaillerie and Knicknack store where she is committed on the ground. Janice is so washed and depressed that she drifts like The Walking Dead. (It has been so since the shooting took place, which we bring together about a year ago.) The store has a major section of weapons for sale (handguns, rifles, you name it), and a customer (Jacob Alexander), showing a level of aggression that mainly seems to be a product of his Télégraphan too telegrahed, asks Janice to help her, even if she insists her department. Take a look at weapons, he says: “Which of these recommended?” “For what?” She answers, finding her question … loaded. “Well, you know,” he said. “Never mind.” It is naturally tight, but what is forward and in the center is not the emotion of the scene – it is the clumsy evidence. In other words, it is so on the nose that he ensures the reality test.

The same is true, in a different way, when Janice will visit her pastor, Steve Calhan, played by Paul Sparks with a strangely exaggerated zeal of self-activation. Ceur member of the pastor thinks he is God’s gift for life coaching, and the film never lets us forget it. His little speech of encouragement does nothing to encourage Janice, but the only reason he is there first is that the film can find a new way of modifying Christian piety. There is a good amount of anticlerical tremor in “Eric Larue”. Janice’s husband, Ron, is played like a Nerd little cut by Alexander Skarsgård, and it is a geek of Jesus who seems to live on another planet of her.

Their emotional distance takes place in the fact that they now belong to different churches. She has the pastor worthy of Steve infopublicity at the first presbyterian, while Ron, at Redeemer, is in force for Pastor Bill Verne (Tracy Lets), who is more a cult roller of cult. Ron attended prayer meetings at Redeemer with his head of office human resources, played by Alison Pill as such a flirtatious hug (“Jesus likes hugs!”, She says) that the version of the film’s comedy encourages us to ask when these two prayer group friends will get a room.

There is a sneaky comeuppancement because Ron tries to resist Janice and to be a commercial husband, she simply diverts him. (If the film took this battle more seriously, it could have generated sparks.) Judy Greer, an actor that I have been venerating for a long time, shows you the anger that was a little stressed under the mausses of Janice, although I want the character to be designed as less a “typical” “typical” “. When Janice and Ron were finally able to talk about their son, Eric, and how he could have killed his classmates, even then, the film barely finds a point of intimacy between them. “Jesus was with him!” said Ron. And when Janice underlines that Eric, after the shooting, returned home and watched television on the sofa, Ron said: “Jesus was with him then too!”

We do not hope that perhaps, when “Eric Larue” will arrive at the meeting of the parental summit of the agony and the rage he continues to speak, he will settle in something convincing and authentic. Instead, when Janice and two of the mothers finally meet, the accent is not on their words. This is what a therapeutic control pastor is, Pastor Steve, always interrupting thoughts like: “The apologies do not create discussions. They put them over. ” The script is from the dramatist Brett Neveau, who based it on his 2002 stage play, but what had Michael Shannon to organize this scene with three parents, dealing with the definition of an impossible situation and to continue to focus on … The Narcissistic Pastor of fly weight? And where, by the way, are the fathers of the victims? It’s so weird that they are never even mentioned.

The real culmination comes after that, when Janice will visit Eric in prison. (It is the first time that she has done so.) As an Eric, the wise actor nation Henrikson has a thing of deep and deep voice. After Eric spends a few minutes intelligently describing the prison conditions, Janice says, in tears, “I had a lot of trouble.” And Eric says, with coldness accusing, “it’s a strange thing to say to someone in prison.” Maybe yes, but it’s an arrogant thing for such a young killer to say.

Eric claims to have remorse and makes it a big point. But he doesn’t say it … with remorse. “Things have become uncontrollable in my mind,” he says, “and I have messed up.” But that doesn’t explain anything. As Janice says: “I understand why you did it … These women are hateful and horrible women and their children were hateful and horrible children”, we recognize what is happening – that she tries to go in a kind of empathy for him – but at the same time, it seems that the film is released from the rails. A schooling drama does not need to be a specific thing, but asking an audience to sit on an East, implicitly, to promise a ripping overview in return. “Eric Larue” is just a lot of independent showboating that does not mean anything.