Home Entertainment
DVD Corner: Son of Rambow
Rebekah Hendershot |
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 The problem with movies about childhood is that they’re written by adults.
Memory doesn’t fade so much as it distorts. Every day of childhood summers was bright and hot and beautiful, every friend a Hallmark card, every school bully the second coming of Darth Vader. Turn that into a Hollywood film and you get a movie about childhood that your childhood self would not recognize.
Son of Rambow is what all those movies wish they could be, if they had the guts to be as bizarre as childhood really was.
The geeky comedy written and directed by Garth Jennings (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) has the advantage of being loosely based on Jennings’ childhood home movies, so the awkwardness and stupidity of preadolescence are captured in all their dubious glory. And because the home movies in question were Rambo tributes acted out by 11-year-olds, things get delightfully weird, delightfully fast. The single-disc DVD (Paramount Home Entertainment, MSRP: $19.99) keeps that weird poignancy coming as fast as viewers can swallow it.
The focus of Son of Rambow is Will Proudfoot (newcomer Bill Milner), a shy and imaginative boy raised in the strict Plymouth Brethren sect that, among other quirks, requires women to dress like Amish farm wives and all members to abstain from television, movies and pop music. When Will meets Lee Carter (Will Poulter, also in his first film role), a champion school bully and smooth operator, Lee sees an opportunity to use Will as an unwilling stuntman in his camcorder epics. And when Lee accidentally exposes Will to a bootlegged copy of First Blood, the first Rambo film, Will’s imagination and Lee’s cunning explode into their summer project--the fantastic, nonsensical and improbably touching camcorder sequel “Son of Rambow” (title courtesy of Will’s creative spelling skills).
 The world of Son of Rambow is one where French exchange students are the arbiters of cool, where colored-pencil fantasies populate the English hedgerows and where the unique pleasures and pains of being 11 years old are on display for all to see. Anyone who remembers watching bullets fly across the screen at that age will recognize the painful seriousness with which Will approaches his chosen role as Rambo’s son, rescuing his father from an evil scarecrow with the homicidal gusto that launched a thousand remakes.
Familiar, too, is the pawky dynamic between the two boys, from their casual and unthinking manipulations and betrayals to the scene where they swear blood brotherhood, slapping their bleeding palms together and then holding them there until they have to rip the scab to separate. Jennings and company have somehow achieved a perfect blend of memory and real life--plus flying dogs, killer scarecrows and a paralyzingly funny use of a hot-wired lamppost. Son of Rambow plunks viewers back into their 11-year-old bodies and hauls them along for the kind of summer adventure we all wish we had.
There are other pleasures, too, including the pitch-perfect Jules Sitruk as the arrogant French student who hijacks the production and Neil Dudgeon (“Roman’s Empire”) as the malevolent sect head trying to seduce Will’s mother. But really, it’s all about watching Will and Lee run around with plastic guns and outsized dreams. And jump screaming out of trees. And hijack a Jeep. And recruit octogenarians from the local nursing home as extras. And the bit with the Seeing Eye dog and the nose hair scissors is pretty good, too.
 The DVD runs just as much like a home movie as the feature does, and even includes the 1986 short film that inspired it--a goofy action yarn called “Aron” that Jennings made when he was 11, headband and all. There’s also a similar homemade action movie from 1996, the winner of a Web site contest for Son of Rambow-esque childhood projects. An audio commentary featuring Jennings, Poulter, Milner and producer Nick Goldsmith keeps in touch with the gonzo-boy spirit of the endeavor. The making-of documentary forgoes the usual slick production and narration in favor of the same four sitting around a table on a river barge and talking about how fun and bizarre everything was. Which, when you think about it, is exactly as things ought to be.
The real beauty of Son of Rambow is that it dares to be silly and sincere and completely obsessed with things blowing up in exactly the way that 11-year-old boys are--in the way we all were before we grew up and decided that being cool was more important than smearing paint on our faces and beating up ninjas. It’s that truth that makes Son of Rambow arguably the funniest DVD I’ve seen all year. It’s almost enough to make you pull out your camcorder and call your friends for an afternoon of video mayhem.
Son of Rambow is now available on DVD exclusively for sale at Best Buy and for rent at all major rental locations.
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