Book of Henry baffling, irresistible
The best films are the ones that require some active, alert viewing. They depend upon a degree of audience interpretation and provide a minimum of predigested pablum. They are films that cannot be reviewed, let alone discussed, in the traditional way. They are dense, vibrant and they keep us off balance until the final fade out. Ideally even longer.
I don’t want to oversell the virtues of that approach in The Book of Henry, a movie that I found irresistible precisely because it is so confounding. It’s not pursuing the complex ambiguity of a Stanley Kubrick film. It is solid, well-crafted entertainment made rather remarkable by how many genre shifts and changes of emotional tone it hits as it progresses.
The film is directed by Colin Trevorrow, who gave us amusing doses of suspense, humour and sci-fi in the fine little indie love story Safety Not Guaranteed and the studio blockbuster Jurassic World. Those films wove their diverse moods together into a single rich whole.
The Book of Henry is something different and mysterious. It features plot lines diverging, re-converging and evolving as the film progresses. It’s a touching family drama, and a serious crime thriller, and a comedy about kids who act adult and immature parents who break the rules.
I won’t describe the action of the film in detail because the less known, the better. Without wandering into spoiler territory, a few things can be noted. It is set in a small U.S. East Coast town that looks as safe and bucolic as any Norman Rockwell community. Naomi Watts leads the cast as Susan, a single mother raising two boys. Her first, 10-ish Henry (Jaeden Lieberher, outstanding in Midnight Special and St. Vincent) isn’t simply precocious; he’s the textbook definition of genius. His mother keeps him in a standard school rather than a gifted kids’ academy to help him develop the skills he’d need to grow up as a healthy, socially oriented, productive adult. And it works: He’s smart without ever being a smartass. His little brother Peter (Jacob Tremblay, exceptional in Room) is still developing, but seems more like a standard-issue great child.
Susan clearly loved Henry before he was a prodigy and doesn’t favour him above Peter, even though he handles the family finances like a hedge-fund manager and his witty, winning conversations are abnormally precise. Mom stays at work waitressing in the nearby diner, even though Henry’s stock wizardry has made that financially needless. Other than small vices like playing graphic video war games and drinking with her sassy coworker, Sheila (Sarah Silverman), she is as normal as blueberry pie.
Trevorrow introduces his setting and characters with the warmhearted glow of a Spielberg film that focuses on the experience of being a kid. He has a similar aptitude for directing children, yet in large part, The Book of Henry is a story about innocence lost and the troubles of reclaiming it. Not all children’s stories provide handy happy endings, and this one falls deeper and deeper down an ever less-lighthearted rabbit hole. It’s no accident that the centrepiece of the film is Watts. Who else can spin empathetic and relatable performances spanning emotions from humour to numbness, despair, joy, confusion and misdirection?
The idyllic neighbourhood unexpectedly turns into a menacing battleground, creating a child-in-danger movie with a distinctively Hitchcockian feel. The boys and Henry’s cute classmate and neighbour Maggie (charismatic Maddie Ziegler, from the reality series Dance Moms) are increasingly called to look angry, scared and vulnerable, and they are great at it. Henry’s resourcefulness is crucial to addressing the scary situation that develops, but it’s Susan who basically carries the full weight of the audience’s fear. Henry slips from a coming-of-age story for a child to a coming-to-responsibility story for an adult.
This is a poignant, frequently funny film that moves into unexpected dark subjects. That means that it’s too independent-minded for a mass audience hoping to forget the bad surprises of human life. That’s just what makes The Book of Henry feel so valuable to me.