During a scene in mindboggling sports drama The Phenom, young Hopper (Johnny Simmons) tells Dorothy (Sophie Kennedy Clark)—over an oppressively grim trio of wind, wind chimes and crickets—that, despite his mother’s belief he has ADD, he is able to focus on the pitcher’s mound by forgetting everything else. As the insects grow louder, the two stare at one another for almost 20 whole seconds before kissing and rubbing their foreheads together for another 20 seconds. Hopper has just praised Dorothy because she’s “got all the Chinese kids beat” and will be class valedictorian. His casual racism, her self-deprecating “I’m just good at studying,” and the script’s willingness to invoke disability to create vocational irony are all pretty romantic, I guess.
Not too romantic, mind you. Hopper’s high school baseball coach lauds “good girl” Dorothy by contrasting her with the unseen Doreen, Hopper’s previous SO. Coach slut shames the mascara-wearing Doreen and explicitly points out that both names start with “D” (and therefore “Dor”), just in case you missed that clever writing trick. He then explains a whole metaphor about Dorothy’s goodness and Doreen’s wicked penchant for makeup, twice. First, he offers a subtextual glut of alliteration and rhyming, including “math,” “class” and “mascara,” and asserts that makeup stopped Doreen from doing algebra. Second, he delivers a priceless couplet that literally explains the figurative and—surprise!—it turns out his sexism was just a Trojan Horse for the movie’s main theme: “Anybody who puts on that kind of mask, they unintentionally expose themselves.”
I have so many questions about The Phenom. Why is Coach’s casual sexism, at which Hopper just goofily smiles, relevant? If your whole point is to set up a moment for an irrelevant character to explicitly state the theme of your film, why is the only way to get there to have him discuss the makeup habits of a teenaged girl who never appears on screen? Why do Dorothy’s parents, while concocting the thin patina of class that marks the Dor-Hopper relationship, confuse socialism and Marxism as if they’re synonyms, right before Hopper calls them “so smart”? Why does Hopper dismiss Dorothy as “a cute little oddball that I pass my time with” in response to her concern that he always sits with his back to a wall? I mean, her hat is perched too high on her head, and she does randomly talk about Harry Potter, but still. Why does his response suggest that baseball scouts are basically wetworkers? Why do parts of this script seem like a series of unfinished ideas scrawled on cocktail napkins while other parts seem like the victims of thoughtfulness and editing? Why is that uneasiness echoed in the sound, which fluctuates between innocuous fluttering and ensiferan intrusiveness? Or in the visuals, which juxtapose gorgeously framed portraits with oddly paced cuts and strange angles?
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