Twelve And Holding Review

"Twelve And Holding" reviews

Movie

Twelve And Holding

Author

anonymous

Date reviewed

2006-11-03 16:00:30

Provider

Review

While teen flicks focussing on girls invariably seem to be set in high school and deal with the politics of friendship, rites-of-passage films about boys are often centred round an adventure gone wrong, the way the adolescents react and what they learn about life.

Although Twelve and Holding features one girl, Malee (Zoe Weizenbaum), among its principal gang, it's very much part of the latter camp. The trigger for the film is a fire in a treehouose, set by local bullies as part of their campaign of victimisation against Jacob (Conor Donovan), a weird, withdrawn kid who hides his birthmark behind a hockey mask.

Tragically the fire kills his brother (also played by Donovan), happy outgoing Rudy and injures his friend Leonard (Jesse Camacho), an overweight kid so traumatised by the experience he begins to eschew the junk food fed him by his overweight mum, who starts to regard him as a family traitor.

Meanwhile Jacob, shut out by the grief of his parents for a brother he always resented, strikes up an unlikely relationship with one of the boys who started the fire, while Malee, seeking male companionship, develops a crush on one of her therapist mother's (Anabella Sciorra) patients. The film never patronises its child characters, while showing their parents to be just as damaged and confused as they are. If the whole doesn't hang together quite as well as certain parts, Twelve And Holding is still a powerful film that explores a refreshingly truthful dysfunctionality.