Apt Pupil

And finally, this movie gets out. After about 10 or 15 years of trying (not to mention recasting and staffing). The film version of Stephen King’s novella has been a long time in coming, but here it is. It’s the last movie of the Austin Film Festival. And, strangely enough, it came off without a hitch! Bryan Singer and Brandon Boyce were there to do a Q&A after the film.

Let’s start with what the movie was originally going to be. Back in 1988 Ricky Schroeder (back when he was still Ricky) and Nicole Williamson were attached to it. They shot about an hour’s worth of good film and then got caught up in legal troubles. When they were ready to start again Ricky’s voice had changed so they couldn’t go on. Luckily, the rights went back to King just in time for Bryan Singer to get them. King sold them to him for a dollar. (I’m calling him next week for one of his short stories. I might actually be able to afford a dollar. I hear he’ll give rights to anybody, too. He figures that in 100 movies made out of his books, at least a few have to be winners–and he’s right.) Singer got his old friend Brandon Boyce to write it. (They met when they were about 11 years old. Brandon was delivering papers (or something like that) and met Bryan at one of the houses on his route. They talked about movies for two hours and have been friends ever since.) Both of them were big fans of the novella, so they really wanted to do it justice. They got Brad Renfro to play Todd Bowden and Sir Ian McKellen to play Kurt Dussander.

So anyway, Todd Bowden is the All-American Boy. He’s blonde-haired, blue-eyed…wait a minute. Brad Renfro? Blonde-haired and blue-eyed? Well, there’s one difference. That’s cool, though. I guess Brad can be the All-American Boy even if he does look more like a punk than Ricky did. Then again, who doesn’t? Brad is a better actor, though.

So Todd becomes very interested in Nazis and the Holocaust. Not too uncommon. I know quite a few guys who were interested in it as kids. Some of them still are for one reason or another. It’s not something we should ever be uninterested in. The problem is that Todd gets interested for the wrong reasons. And he gets too interested. So much so that he stalks a neighbor named Arthur Denker who he figures could be ex-Nazi officer Kurt Dussander. He’s much older than his pictures (this is, after all, 1984), but it’s got to be him.

It is. He confronts him in his home and makes him admit who he is. Then he forces him to tell all of his stories. Slowly, ever so slowly, Todd starts to become the monster that Dussander once was able to be. He gets distracted by the stories: he can’t think straight, straight A’s turn to D’s, sports go to the wayside, wakes up in cold sweats… Things get so bad that his girlfriend, Becky Trask (Heather McComb–Maggie from Party Of Five), starts to wonder if maybe he doesn’t really like girls. It’s not really that. It’s just that he’s more interested in torture. (There’s an interesting scene in the book telling a dream Todd has about the only way he can get excited. It involved an electrified toy. I’ll leave it at that.) Then Edward French, the guidance counselor, (played by David “I’m so bland I could put a cup of water to shame” Schwimmer), sends a fatal note to Todd’s parents about his grades.

The cast does a great job. There’s really only two characters that we pay any attention to at all, Todd and Dussander. Brad Renfro is a pretty decent actor. I heard his old Southern accent showing through a couple of times, but he kept it pretty well under control. He seems to be best when he can be a punk. Probably because that’s his own character. (I hear that, after The Client, Susan Sarandon sent him a letter saying that she hoped he learned something and had fun on the set. He replied, “I didn’t really learn anything. This acting stuff is easy.” Tell it like it is, bud.) This movie required him to go beyond punk, though, and he pulled it off pretty well. Ian McKellen is, of course, awesome. He pulls off the German commander perfectly. Just the right flair and stoicism.

Schwimmer, well, he’s Schwimmer. A dork. An idiot. A milquetoast. But it works. That’s the character. Sneaker Ed (well, that’s what they call him in the book) is constantly made fun of in the school. He tries so hard to fit in that he doesn’t realize that he’s going overboard with it. Singer said that he’s never seen an episode of Friends, so he doesn’t see Schwimmer the way everyone else does. He saw him in a play once that showed what a good actor he can be. He still thought of him for the part of Ed, though. He’s also there to give people a familiar face to see after seeing these two main characters played by actors that most people don’t know too well. He didn’t care if people laugh when Schwimmer comes on the screen (they did), as long as they don’t laugh when he leaves the screen (they didn’t). Oh, and Joe Morton (Blues Brothers 2000, numerous early John Sayles movies) shows up as an FBI man, Joshua Jackson (Mr. Bland, Too from Dawson’s Creek) is Todd’s best friend, Elias Koteas (Fallen, Gattaca, The Thin Red Line) is a doomed bum, Bruce Davison (Six Degrees Of Separation, The Cure) and Ann Dowd (Nothing Sacred) are Todd’s ever unknowing parents.

The music was cool, too. It was written by John Ottman who also wrote the score for The Usual Suspects. It’s pretty obvious, too. The two scores sound a lot alike. By the way, Ottman also edited these two movies. Singer says that it helped when it came to working with him in both aspects. This way, if he wanted to change something he didn’t have to go to two different people and change everything. All he had to do was tell John that it needed to be changed and it was done in minutes. The problem with Ottman is what happens after he writes the main themes. He calls Singer and says, “I hope you like it. If you do, great. If not, I’ll kill myself and take all of the music with me.” He said that he wasn’t exaggerating. Sometimes I wonder about Hollywood people.

The movie itself moves a little fast. The pacing of the book was perfect. The transformations of Todd and Dussander into killing machines is so gradual that you almost don’t notice it. It’s really one of King’s scariest stories because it could have happened. (It would be harder now since the leftover Nazis are in their 90s. Can’t do too much damage anymore, I guess.) It really is a great story. The movie isn’t quite so good because it moves so fast. They have to get it all done in less than two hours. They changed the ending, but that’s fine. I kind of like the ending better this way. Singer and Boyce said that they tried to use the original ending, but they couldn’t get there without it being trite. It worked well in the novella because it took place over four years of Todd’s life. The movie was only a few months (I got kind of tired of reading “One month later” in the beginning.) After all, they didn’t want to make an epic.

Considering that flaw, the movie was pretty good. Not as good as Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption by any means (they are also from the book Different Seasons). I seemed to be one of the few who liked it, though. A lot of the people I saw it with didn’t like it. I think it really helps to have read the book. So, read that (it’s not that long), then go see the movie.

By the way, for all you X-Man fans out there: Singer is directing the live-action movie. It should probably be out by the end of next year (I’m guessing) because they finally have a script that he’s happy with. He hasn’t been happy with any of the drafts until now. Who wrote it? Why, Chris McQuarrie, of course, the writer of The Usual Suspects! Should be a great movie. Probably better than this one. Can’t stand up to Usual Suspects, though. That was too amazing to beat right now. It’s a shame that the Academy didn’t think so. Dumb-dumbs. All of ‘em.