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Joe the King (1999)
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Joe the King, a debut
writing/directing effort from actor Frank Whaley, offers a deeply sad picture of
mistreated youth, told with considerable skill, and blessedly shorn of sentimentality,
from the point of view of Joe Henry (Noah Fleiss), son of an abusive, wife-beating,
alcoholic father (Val Kilmer).
The film's opening sequence, a school scene when Joe is nine years old,
establishes the pattern of unjust and disproportionate punishment to which Joe is
subjected. Humiliated as the son of the drunken school janitor, an authoritarian teacher,
surely working out her own issues in a response disproportionate to Joe's minor offense,
pulls down his pants in front of the class and spanks his bare behind. Even the other kids
are shocked and sympathetic. What Whaley has caught and conveyed is the feeling of
powerlessness of a kid in the face of authority, fair or not.
Cleverly, Whaley offers another scene in the same time frame, in which
Joe's father is equally powerless and subjected to verbal humiliation by the school
principal; he can't retaliate since his job is at stake.
With a quick five year jump forward in time, the balance of the film
takes place while Joe is an adolescent of fourteen. But Joe the King doesn't
dissolve into ordinary teenage angst. The unjust teacher of Act I seems now a minor
prelude to Joe's suffering at the hands of his father, who remains in a drunken haze,
finding fault with any convenient target, and expressing his rage at his own powerlessness
by lashing out with fist at whoever is nearby.
The film, with Fleiss' extraordinary performance, shows not only the
deterioration of the boy's behavior (chronic lateness for school, petty theft growing to
grander larceny), but more importantly, the increasing loss of caring, the self-protective
hardening of the kid who needs to retreat into himself to escape the ugliness of his world
that is not of his making. Whaley allows for moments of humor and moments when the victim
strikes back, providing some contrast from the dominant bleak events and throwing them
into sharp relief.
In a nicely drawn scene at the local roller rink, Joe watches with
jealousy as his older brother courts a girl from the other side of the tracks, a girl to
whom Joe is attracted. She is resented on the surface by Joe and his equally poor buddies,
but coveted in that she represents the comfort and the perceived greater safety of
middle class life. Advances made by a girl closer to Joe's home turf leave him
uninterested.
The arching line of the film is the inevitable downward curve of Joe's
destiny, but its richness is in the range of small incidents that together explore
subtleties not only of the boy's oppression, but of his feelings and youthful
sensitivities, of hopefulness before all hope is lost.
By the time deteriorating circumstances push Joe's father to behave
like a father for the first time, it is clearly too late for Joe, but he is surely moved
at the revelation. As he is shipped out to a juvenile detention center, he clings first to
his brother and then to his pathetic, ineffective, but loving mother. It may be a
dysfunctional family, but it's his and it's family. He can only guess, and we imagine all
to well, the horrors yet to come.
- Arthur Lazere
