A Little Closer

It’s immediately apparent that 11-year-old Stephen (Eric Baskerville) is one of those kids. Seemingly born luckless, there’s nothing particularly wrong with him but there’s also something not quite right. Incapable of ingratiating himself to anyone, he’s grown accustomed to following in others’ wakes. And when he suffers a gruesome freak injury at the outset of writer-director Matthew Petock’s debut feature, it hardly comes as a surprise. Despite having known Stephen for only minutes, we understand that this is exactly the sort of thing that happens to him.
The other members of Stephen’s family bear less conspicuous scars from their misfortunes. Minus a father figure, 15-year-old Marc (Parker Lutz) turns to his dirtbag boss for romantic advice. At his urging, he pressures a shy girl (Catherine Andre) into becoming his girlfriend. Seeing how easily she acquiesces, he continues to wear down her resistance. Meanwhile, the boys’ thirtysomething mother, Sheryl (Sayra Player), can only dream of such attention being lavished on her. A fixture at the social mixers held in a rural Virginia community centre, she makes a practice of drinking a little too much and losing her nerve.
Having debuted on the festival circuit in 2011, A Little Closer occasionally recalls David Gordon Green’s George Washington, employing similarly lush lensing courtesy of Daniel Patrick Carbone but dispensing with the overt lyricism. And if this year’s The Kings of Summer celebrated the season’s capacity for storybook adventure, Petock’s film reminds us that it can also be a time defined by drudgery. Each member of this family is caught in an uninspired routine, with Stephen daydreaming through summer school, Marc hosing down used cars and Sheryl toiling as a housekeeper.