"Twelve and Holding" is an imperfect movie about an embarrassing age: that horrible middle-school period when children do their first awkward flirting with adulthood. Director Michael Cuesta and writer Anthony Cipriano put three 12-year-olds through this hormonal horror show as they react to a real tragedy. Two bullies (Michael C. Fuchs and Martin Campetta) firebomb a treehouse -- only to find that two boys were sleeping inside. One of the kids, Rudy, burns to death. The other, an obese dork named Leonard (Jesse Camacho), falls on his head and survives. The bullies cut a deal to spend a year in juvvie -- leaving the victims' friends and families stewing in incoherent rage. And it's here that the movie thrusts three barely pubescent kids into three arenas of adulthood, even as their negligent parents are getting on with their lives.
Leonard, robbed of his sense of taste by his injuries, turns into a fitness fanatic -- then tries to force his newfound discipline on his equally obese mother (Marcia DeBonis). Rudy's birthmark-scarred brother, Jacob (Conor Donovan), visits the bullies in prison, and bonds with one of them even while plotting his revenge. And Malee (Zoe Weizenbaum) laser-focuses her embryonic sexuality on a former firefighter (Jeremy Renner) who's a patient of her therapist mother (Annabella Sciorra). It's a lot of drama to pack into just more than 90 minutes, and Cuesta's low-key visual approach plays nicely against the film's roiling passions and over-the-top (some might say too over-the-top) final act. Each kid's story takes on a different aspect of adulthood -- sexuality, justice, personal responsibility -- with a differing tone to match. Leonard's story is the most bombastic, but Camacho anchors it while undergoing a total physical transformation. Meanwhile, Donovan captures the anguish of a kid who takes his mother's vengeful words literally, even as his visits with his brother's killer add troubling moral nuances to his bloodlust. But my favorite performance is actually in the story with the lowest life-and-death stakes: Weizenbaum manages to be both poignant and slightly creepy as the fatherless, stuttering girl acting out her "soul mate" fantasies on the first daddy figure at hand. Cuesta and Cipriano walk a fine line here, exploring Malee's psychology without diving into Lolita ickiness. Weizenbaum breaks your heart when she brightly tells Renner, "You've got to take chances, get crazy . . . I play the flute!" or when she sings a flat rendition of Blue Oyster Cult's "Burning for You" to him during a school recital. If I have one problem with "Twelve and Holding," it's probably of the "they didn't make it the way I would have!" variety: It struck me that the melodramatic endings sort of betray the film's built-up psychological complexity. (The resolution of Leonard's story in particular felt a little too TV-ready.) The filmmakers probably would argue it's in keeping with the overheated world views of our protagonists, or in the service of suburban satire, or something. I'd argue that a very good movie could have been great if it had kept to subtler psychological tones.
source:www.oregonlive.com
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