REVIEWED - MEAN CREEK: A coming-of-age drama shaped as a morality tale, Mean Creek puts six teens in a boat for a journey downstream that casts an ominous shadow over the bright sunshine reflected on the water. We know that the purpose of the trip is to pull a practical joke on a school bully, but as it becomes clear that most of the film will take place on the river, the movie takes on an incipient air of tragedy, writes Michael Dwyer
The bully is George (Josh Peck), an overweight and obnoxious schoolboy who finds an easy victim in Sam (Rory Culkin), who is small for his age. When George oversteps the mark and sends Sam home with a bruised face, Sam's older brother (Trevor Morgan) devises a revenge strategy with his best friends (Scott Mechlowicz and Ryan Kelley). They lure George out on a boat journey, planning to humiliate him. The sixth passenger is the only girl, Sam's 13-year-old school sweetheart (Carly Schroeder).
Earlier on, we see a different side of George, as a lonely outsider whose loudmouth arrogance is a mask to disguise his vulnerability. When the other teens realise this, it is too late in some cases, and it does not help that George is too immature to know when to call a halt to his provocations. A moral dilemma has to be faced.
Jacob Aaron Estes, the movie's young first-time writer-director, has cited as his inspirations the bullying he experienced in his own life as well as the journey in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Mean Creek prompts many other reference points: the unthinking cruelty of the children in Lord of the Flies, the coldly calculated student violence in Elephant, and the adolescent emotional turmoil at the core of three 1980s SE Hinton screen adaptations starring Matt Dillon: Tex, The Outsiders and Rumble Fish.
As in most of those movies, adults are virtually peripheral to the narrative. Estes adeptly builds the simmering tension on the boat and sets it against the serenity of the movie's handsome Oregon landscapes. He wisely refuses to distract from that pivotal setting, keeping his focus firmly on the escalating drama aboard the boat.
Crucially, Estes gets his casting precisely right, and his six young central actors have the skill and presence to command the screen. Culkin, who has appeared in other movies as younger versions of characters played by his older brothers, Macaulay and Kieran, is particularly impressive. As the eldest of the boys, Mechlowicz, last seen in the dire Euro Trip, smoulders with the torment rooted inside his character's macho exterior.
