[Originally posted July 5, 2006 at MySpace]
After reading the recommendation from Rich, the man who has given the world the gift of the fabulous fourfour blog, I watched Mysterious Skin on Monday night. I had never seen any of director Greg Araki's other films; reviews of them had indicated a pattern of ultra-violent, self-indulgent nihilism, and I can get that at home watching the cats.
But Mysterious Skin was an adaptation of a novel, so Araki could only go so far off the rails, and the framework provided by the book allows him to fill the film with arresting images. The plot is a simple, rough story of two boys who grew up in the same town, had unsettling childhood experiences, and chose very different paths as a result. Neil, seduced and molested by a coach, grows up to be a hustler, while Bryan tries to chase down the truth about whether or not he was abducted by aliens.
Rich's review of the film captures so much of how and why it still haunts me. (Like Rich, I urge you to rent and watch the movie before reading the full review.) But I'd like to spotlight the movie's central performance, that of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Neil. That name might be familiar to you if you were a fan of NBC's Monday night comedy lineup in the mid-90s. He was Tommy, the senior alien who got stuck being the pre-teen family member on "Third Rock from the Sun."
This guy.
As Neil, he occupies an entirely different universe, one where sex, defiance and self-destruction are bound together and seduction begins with a sneer. Before long, he's the most jaded 19-year-old imaginable, so much so that I thought his customers surely couldn't convince themselves that Neil was as young as his actual years.
But near the film's end, a horrific event shatters even Neil's armor, and you see him looking far, far younger, not too different than he did the summer his world changed. I've color-corrected the crap out of this shot, but I hope it conveys some of what his face showed in the entire sequence.
It was one of the most amazing performances I've seen in any 2005 movie, and I wish more people had seen it. Oddly, at various points, Gordon-Levitt's face reminded me of Heath Ledger's. I can only hope that some casting director somewhere sees the same resemblance and casts those two actors as brothers. I would stand in line in the rain to see them onscreen together. They wouldn't even have to make out.
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