‘I don’t like that kid. He smiles too much...’
I’m all for challenging cinema. The role of any art form is to make the person experiencing it feel something. And while L.I.E. feels like a deeply personal film for writer-director Michael Cuesta, it is also a film that is difficult to enjoy unless you are Michael Cuesta. Apparently, the film is a reflection of Cuesta’s own burgeoning sexuality during adolescence. That’s all well and good, but just because something is personal, doesn’t make it affecting for anyone else, or good even, and this self-serious, dull film is neither…
Howie Blitzer (Paul Dano) and his weird, off-putting friends spend their evenings breaking into people’s houses. One night, they happen on the house of “Big John” Harrigan (Brian Cox), and this results in Howie and John striking up an unlikely and inappropriate relationship.
Despite the fact that both Cox and Dano deliver nuanced, complex performances, both of their characters are so unlikeable that I didn’t care at all what happened to either of them. The themes of sexuality are both overt and, to be honest, pretty gross, and Dano also wears some truly terrible earrings that are difficult to forgive or ignore. The film also looks like shit, all washed out and colourless, and the plot is both thin and tedious.
L.I.E. is highly rated in some quarters, but I found it to be pretentious and even smug in places. As Peter Griffin once memorably said about The Godfather, “It insists on itself”. And this film does too. Let’s be honest with ourselves, it’s a load of rubbish, isn’t it?
