It’s pretty rare when I actually bother to see a relatively recent film, but, sometimes, I actually do get my head out of the sand and see something new for once. About a Boy was a movie I saw a few weeks ago, and it was quite good.

Hugh Grant plays a thirty-something bachelor who has the sort of life that many of us might believe would be the greatest sort of life imaginable. He doesn’ t work, and has never worked in his life, in fact. He lives off the royalties of a silly Christmas song that his father wrote decades ago that improbably became a chintzy Christmas standard -- Grant gets embarrassed any time that he hears the song, but why worry about that when it helps pay the bills, I’d say!

Grant treats his irresponsible lifestyle almost like his personal religion -- a funny sequence is when he tells us about his exhausting lifestyle; a game of pool (his exercise!), primping himself in the mirror for about half an hour, watching television all day, and so on and so on. He is also pretty irresponsible when it comes to relationships with women -- he soon hits on the idea of going to a single parents meeting because he can meet some desperate chicks. He concocts a whole story about having a three year old named Ned, hoping to draw sympathy from these unsuspecting, vulnerable women.

He is able to get one woman to fall for his charms, and they actually set up a date. The woman brings along a son of a friend, much to Grant’s chagrin. We’ve already seen this kid (Nicholas Hoult) and his mother (Toni Colette), and their issues, but Grant, having seen this kid only for the first time, figures the kid to be a pretty strange one, and completely in the way of Grant’s plans. Fate has something else in store for our hero, however, when the three return to the kid’s house and find the mother unconscious on the couch, from an apparent suicide attempt from sleeping pills. She’s rushed to hospital -- everything turns out okay, physically, at least, of course, but the big thing is what happens to Grant’s character, when he finds himself a major observer, if not a participant, of the kid’s emotional baggage.

The kid, besides being in a household with a woman who is divorced, and emotionally depressed, also has a hard time fitting in at school. He doesn’t have a healthy homelife, and he doesn’t have a good male role model either, so he ends up looking to Grant, a man who makes slacking into an art, as that role model. Grant’s not too impressed, especially when the kid keeps dropping in to his apartment every day after school. This becomes a bit of a routine, however, and Grant figures that he ought to help the poor guy out the best way he knows how, which in Grant’s case is to buy him a new pair of shoes, in hopes that he’d actually look “cool”.

These two seemingly mismatched people have a lot to teach each other, it seems. Grant tries to impart on the kid, someone who tries hard to please, and is frightened to just be himself, the idea that he should be more of an individual, and do his own thing. The kid, in turn, makes Grant realize that while he himself is doing his own thing, his own thing turns out to be nothing more than a selfish shell of an existence, in which he is out of touch with other people’s feelings and lives, and with responsibility.

This sort of movie is fairly reminiscent of something that Billy Wilder might have directed -- Wilder movies like The Apartment and The Fortune Cookie were perfect mixtures of comedy and seriousness, and About a Boy continues in that fine tradition. This movie is a comedy, but at the same time, it never descends into slapstick, and takes itself as seriously as it’s able to, and actually gets away with the storypoints about Grant’s realization about his life, and Collette’s depression and suicide attempt (much as Wilder got away with Shirley Maclaine’s despair in The Apartment).

A good scene that shows us outrageous humor and seriousness is during a restaurant scene when the kid’s mother trots up to where Grant and his sister are sitting and demands to know why her kid is sneaking out and visiting him. Naturally, everyone suspects something illicit, and Grant tries to stammer his way out of it until he simply throws everything back at the kid’s mother and says that the kid feels that he has to visit him because nobody else will look after his best interests -- especially not this screwed-up, overprotective, emotionally smothering and emotionally demanding mother.

The acting is quite good, especially from Hugh Grant and Nicholas Hoult. Hugh Grant is good as always, of course, especially when he plays these charming but somewhat amoral blokes (as in Bridget Jones’ Diary). Hoult is interesting as the kid, mainly because his role isn’t for any “cuteness” factor -- the kid’s sort of an odd duck to begin with, and manages to perilously come close to, if not completely go over the edge of, embarrassment. The script makes the wise choice of focusing on both of these people equally -- both of them narrate certain portions of the story, so both of them are accorded the same psychic weight.

Interesting that Toni Colette’s character is not a love interest -- usually, the natural thing would be to get the kid’s mother to go out with the male protagonist, don’t you think? The kid does, for a time, consider this, but Grant’s character hasn’t much interest in this emotional case, and Colette’s character doesn’t seem to be interested either. Grant does become interested in a woman, however, and proves that old habits die hard, when he actually enlists the kid to be a stand-in for another fictitious child -- although this time, Grant finds out that he has real emotions this time, for both the woman and the kid, and finds the whole lying game a little more problematic.

The final interesting thing to note is that the guys who directed this movie also directed the American Pie movies. I’ve not seen those films, but everybody and their cat knows about the famous pie scene. Nobody fornicates with pastry, or any other inanimate objects, in About a Boy, but you will find some good humor, a story that manages to be true and emotional without being sappy, and another charming performance by Hugh Grant.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening