Boy

“Can you stop calling me ‘dad’? It sounds weird,” isn’t a line you’d expect from a feel-good coming-of-age movie. And the suggestion that follows, “How about ‘Shogun’? I like that,” puts Boy squarely in the realm of comedy. But Boy isn’t exactly a comedy, even though it will make you laugh, and it isn’t a feel-good movie. It’s a movie about crushing failure, personal identity, and the possibility of hope as experienced in one M?ori family, circa 1984.
Boy opens with an 11-year-old kid (James Rolleston) giving a school report titled “Who Am I?”, his voice speaking over a montage of scenes from his life. It begins with a M?ori greeting: “Kia ora. My name is Boy, and welcome to my interesting world. My favorite person is Michael Jackson. He is the best singer and dancer in the world. Last month, he put out a record called Thriller that sold a gazillion copies, and now he lives in a castle with a snake and a monkey.” He introduces the people in his community, including his grandma, aunt, cousins, brother Rocky and friends—among them a boy named Dallas, his sisters Dynasty and Falcon Crest. “Dynasty is the only kid around here with a job. She does after-school gardening work for her dad,” he says, while we see scenes of a girl picking marijuana from a cornfield and handing it to a shadowy figure.
Boy’s report moves from comedy to tenderness as he begins to talk about his own dad, Alamein (Taika Waititi), “named after some place where the M?ori battalion fought during World War 2,” then explains: “My dad’s not here right now. He’s a busy man. He’s a master carver, deep sea treasure diver, the captain of the rugby team … When he comes home, he’s taking me to see Michael Jackson, LIVE. The end.” Returning to the classroom setting, where students are utterly bored and the teacher is smoking a cigarette out an open window, we feel the poignancy of Boy’s fantasy. Soon we also discover the lie of his father’s life—as another student whispers, “Yo man, you’re a liar. You’re dad’s not overseas. He’s in jail for robbery … Same cell block as my dad.”
What separates Boy from other movies in its category—say, the 2003 Russian film The Return, which also tells of a years-distant father coming home to two sons—is its child-centeredness. These kids’ fantasy world, which includes not only Boy’s humorous revisions but Rocky’s belief that he has magical powers and can change reality around him simple by raising his hand and concentrating, creates just the right amount of irony to make the much harsher “real” world believable. The movie’s power lies in how the irony collapses. Increasingly, viewers find themselves seeing the world through the children’s eyes. It’s not only easier to take than the violent failure of Alamein, whom we eventually meet, but we suspect it might be more emotionally true than the adult way of looking at the world. At least it’s more hopeful, and that’s exactly what we, like Alamein, need.