It would be an easy thing to declare that the underlying theme in the film “The Mudge Boy” is about the early stirrings of gay behavior in an adolescent boy who—at least to others, including his own father—consider him just a little too sissy for his own good. But that explanation, in my opinion, lacks both subtlety and oversimplifies the story portrayed in this film.

Duncan Mudge (Emile Hirsch) is a teen-aged farm boy whose mother has recently died at an early age of a heart attack. Suddenly, Duncan and his farmer father, Edgar (Richard Jenkins), are left to fend for themselves. With the sudden absence of a feminine touch around the house, tradition-bound domestic duties fall into Duncan’s lap. He accepts them without complaint, and with an ease that his father finds disconcerting. Duncan can even sit in his late mother’s chair at the dinner table and perform an uncanny impersonation of her as she complains of Edgar’s chronic lack of verbal engagement in the family conversation. This sort of dead-ringer mimicry of one's parent is certainly believable when a daughter stands in for a mother, or a son a father; but a son doing his dead mother? Things appear to be amiss in the Mudge household. This emulation of mother continues as Duncan also takes over her task of delivering eggs to the locals. Wearing her old battered hat, and riding her ‘girl’s bicycle,’ he even adopts one of her favorite hens as his constant companion and mascot on his delivery route.

But where this film diverges from other coming-of-age gay stories is that sexual urge has very little to do with what drives Duncan. His only contacts with others his age are with a gaggle of n’er-do-wells who cruise, drink and cavort with a couple of small-town floozies. So, his outlets for fulfillment appear to be narrow. But then things become complicated.

This complication becomes evident when he starts hanging around with a local boy named Perry (Tom Guiry); a brutish, sinewy and virile youth who mucks up after his drunken father’s milk cows and parades his oversized manhood for anyone to see. Duncan looks…and he even looks when Perry is being…um…obliged by one of the willing girls. But Duncan and Perry have a great deal in common. They are both at that awkward age where alliances, loves and desires are becoming set in stone. Perry sees a fellow wounded creature in Duncan. Duncan sees someone that he can perhaps love.

And it is this absence of a nurturing parental love that is having a profound effect upon Duncan’s desires for physical love. Writer/director Michael Burke has compiled a subtly complicated story of how a boy’s budding desires can often become indistinguishable between physical attraction and childish emulation for a missing parent. In this regard I believe his obsession with his dead mother’s clothes become less a desire to gender switch, or perhaps play the role of submissive, than it is to hold her close to his heart; to mourn the loss of her wit and love…something that is missing in his relationship with his father.

The acting in this film is subtle and superb. Jenkin’s Edgar is a man who knows nothing but the demands of farm life and the necessity of maintaining order in his narrow universe. When the presence of his dead wife’s things becomes a nuisance to him he deals with them in the most direct fashion that he is capable of understanding. This only increases Duncan’s attachment to them. Young Hirsch beautifully plays his Duncan as a youth whose arrested maturity stems from his social isolation and sexual ambivalence. The keeping of the pet chicken and his affinity not simply for women’s clothing, but specifically for his mother’s clothing, attest to the fact that Duncan hasn’t broken with the past; hasn’t quite made that transition from childhood to adulthood yet. Guiry’s character of Perry is even more profound in his ambivalence. At one point he is Duncan’s best friend, willing to overlook his weirdness, his odd attachment to the chicken and his lack of curiosity toward girls. But it is Perry’s own complicated attachment to Duncan that is the deeper study in sexual parameters. His is a story unto itself.

The creative team of Director Burke, and Stanley Tucci, who surprises us in his role as Executive Producer, have taken the staid, bucolic setting of the middle-American farm and made it a hotbed of adolescent sensuality. Even Burke’s directing style, which mostly consists of holding his camera steady to frame his scenes in a wheat field, a cluttered old barn or upon the creaky floors of an old fashioned parlor creates a story held in suspension; a relatively undated study of the clash of youth with the bone-weary demands of farm life and its incompatibility as a medium for social and sexual growth.



Recommended:
Yes

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age