Michael O’Sullivan
LIKE the sweetly self-conscious protagonist of the movie
– 14-year-old Bobby Marks, who worries about his weight while trying to navigate a summer filled with bullying and life lessons – there is a lot to love in this gently funny and wise little movie.
Based on Robert Lipsyte’s semi-autobiographical 1977 youngadult novel the film will speak most directly to teens who, like its hero and wryly self-aware narrator, might be concerned about their physical appearance.
At the same time, its story, which also deals tangentially with class tension, religious bigotry, ethnic prejudice and homophobia, has as much to say to those kids’ parents and grandparents, who should find the film’s message as uplifting – and its unassuming central character as charming – as young people do.
Screenwriter David Scearce’s follow-up to the 2009 Oscar-nominee
relocates the action of Lipsyte’s book from the civil rights-era 1950s to the post-Vietnam 1970s, retaining the setting of an upstate New York lakeside resort in the Catskills, where Bobby (Blake Cooper) and his family have a holiday cabin for the season. It is there that Bobby – one of the scorned “summer people” in the eyes of some resentful locals – encounters bullying in the form of a sullen townie named Willie (Beau Knapp).
If Knapp’s Vietnam War veteran with a violent past is a bit heavy on cliché, his character arc nevertheless allows for some surprises.
And Knapp’s performance, while one-dimensional at times, is counterbalanced by Cooper’s subtlety and unforced charisma.
The young actor, so good as the portly, doomed Chuck in
never asks for our sympathy, instead seeking – and getting – recognition for a deeply nuanced portrayal.
Over the course of the film, whose period setting is evoked by songs from the Marmalade, DIVING IN: In
Bobby Marks (Blake Cooper) charms as a bullied, self-aware teen enduring a holiday in the Catskills.