The
Book of Henry is a bad movie, but it’s bad in a very
unique way. On the surface, it’s competent on a technical level. The camera
work, cinematography and editing are all decent, and it’s very clear from the
performances that both the actors and director see something in the story that
I might be missing. A movie can survive failings in all those categories as
long as the story is good, and the script is so packed to the gills with clichés,
insufferable characters and baffling decisions that follow a logic foreign to
most sane minds, that knowing the director of this movie is going to direct Star Wars Episode IX makes me fear for
the future of the franchise. But it’s hard to go into detail about why this
movie doesn’t work without spoilers, so consider this your warning.
Our story follows Henry
(Jaeden Lieberher), a child prodigy who’s not only way smarter than his
classmates, but also his teachers, his mother (Naomi Watts) and just about
everyone else in town. He’s also incredibly emotionally mature for his age, so
he spends his time looking after his little brother Peter (Jacob Tremblay), and
even doing his mom’s finances since she can’t do them herself. He immediately suspects
that his next-door neighbor Christine (Maddy Zeigler) is being physically (and
possibly sexually) abused by her stepfather (Dean Norris), but when he tries to
tell the adults, they either don’t believe him or don’t want to get involved
since the stepfather is also the police commissioner. Halfway through the movie
Henry gets a brain tumor and dies, but he leaves a notebook for his mother with
detailed instructions on how to kill their neighbor.
Yeah, it’s that kind of
movie.
There are several things
wrong with this movie, but the biggest problem has to be the violent tone
shift. The first half hour or so is some of the most aggressively twee pap you’ll
come across. Just think about every schmaltzy feel-good family movie starring a
precocious moppet in the past 25 years condensed into 30 minutes and you’ve got
the first act. There are several moments and set pieces that are supposed to be
whimsical, but just come across as eye rolling. (He builds Rube Goldberg machines!
He has a kickass treehouse! He handles the family’s finances while his mom
plays video games!) But the charm doesn’t really work since most of the
characters are annoying and unlikable. We’re told throughout the movie that
Henry is this golden boy that everyone loves, but every instance of him
interacting with other people just makes him look like a smug, anti-social buzzkill.
He knows how more intelligent he is than everyone else, but he’s totally self-righteous
about it. My tolerance was broken when he’s hospitalized and he explains his
illness to his doctor. His mom isn’t
much better since she’s the reversal of Henry’s character. She’s basically a
functioning alcoholic, but her drinking is only brought up once and then
immediately forgotten about. It does kind of help explain some things, but the
movie can’t really decide if her childishness makes her a good mom or a bad mom.
The dynamic between her and Henry is like that between Dexter from Dexter’s Laboratory and his parents if
it were played completely straight.
After Henry dies, not
only does the movie become significantly darker, but the plot goes completely
off the rails. The tonal shift I don’t mind. Hell, one of my favorite movies of all time starts off as a wacky comedy before dropping all pretenses and
becoming a serious drama. But while comedy and tragedy go hand in hand, not
even the best writers could make a smooth transition between child cancer tearjerker
and that same kid having extremely meticulous plans for a murder.
This is a movie that
requires an incredibly high suspension of disbelief, and it constantly tries to
find the snapping point in that threshold. I could shrug off some nonsensical
plot points like how Henry was able to make financial investments that set the
family up for life and yet his mom continues to work as a waitress and drive a
beat-up car, but there were moments where that patience was put to the test. After
the mom gets ahold of Henry’s notebook, it leads her to a safe filled with
items needed to do the deed, including a tape recorder and a tape that walk her
through the process step by step, and even predicts what she’s going to say
when she’s going to say it. From that point on, she keeps having conversations
with this tape, and I kept waiting for the joke to be over and yet it kept on
going for most of the rest of the movie. I can buy this kid being smart enough
to think several steps ahead, but having post-mortem clairvoyance? That’s
really pushing it. There’s also one moment at the end that’s supposed to be the
emotional capstone that I dare not spoil here, that’s played as cute and is
supposed to be the brother’s last tribute to Henry, but it has some very
disturbing implications.
At the end of the day, I
can’t for the life of me figure out who The
Book of Henry is for. The plot’s a mess, the characters are awful, it doesn’t
really work as the whimsical kid’s movie it dresses up as, most of the adults
are going to lose their patience with it really fast. It almost makes me want
to encourage you to see it anyway, because I haven’t even scratched the surface
of everything wrong with this misguided piece of saccharine garbage, and some
of its most baffling moments just have to be seen to be believed. I honestly
almost feel kind of bad for trashing it since there’s clearly a lot of
sincerity behind it, but just because you believe in your creation doesn’t mean
the rest of us are going to buy it.
3/10
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