MOVIE REVIEW - WHOLE NEW THING - A Family’s Growing Pains, Both Adolescent and Adult
April 6, 2007
By Stephen Holden - New York Times
“Whole New Thing,” a minutely observed family drama about a hothouse flower transplanted into the wild outdoors, is the rare film in which the actors playing parents and child feel biologically connected. That flower, the 13-year-old Emerson Thorsen (Aaron Webber), is the haughty, home-schooled only child of a bohemian couple living in a house they built in the Nova Scotia woods.
If its portrait of hippie parents raising a misfit child has much in common with Rebecca Miller’s “Ballad of Jack and Rose,” “Whole New Thing” refrains from going to the same extremes.
Directed by Amnon Buchbinder from a screenplay he wrote with Daniel MacIvor, this movie is a more conventional, but also more believable, exploration of the potential cost of thumbing your nose at society. If first-generation rebels have their principles to fall back on, for their children, it suggests, it’s often a different story.
Emerson’s father, Rog (Robert Joy), a scientific visionary, has staked his future on a yet-to-be-perfected system for recycling human waste. Money is scarce, and the Thorsens’ marriage is also suffering from Rog’s sexual neglect of his earthy wife, Kaya (Rebecca Jenkins).
When Kaya insists that Emerson attend a local public school and experience the real world, the intellectually precocious boy — who has written (by hand) a thousand-page novel about hobbits — receives a rude shock. Arrogant, snooty and entitled, and resembling an androgynous, long-haired Harry Potter, Emerson encounters bullies for the first time.
Mr. Webber’s exquisite performance makes this virginal boy, who gives massages to his parents’ friends, at once insufferable and endearing. The smartest student in his middle-school English class, he ridicules the book the class is studying, “Snowboard Snowjob.” The sympathetic teacher, Don Grant (Mr. MacIvor), promptly substitutes “As You Like It,” and immediately you sense a boost in the class’s academic level.
Emerson, whose unformed, uncertain sexuality is just beginning to emerge, develops a serious crush on Don and pursues his quarry with a reckless single-mindedness. Don, a lonely gay man acutely aware of appropriate student-teacher boundaries, takes his pleasure at a public restroom frequented by gay men while trying to fend off his panting young admirer.
The movie adroitly parallels Emerson’s pursuit of Don with Kaya’s impulsive affair with a working-class neighbor who attends one of the Thorsens’ parties. Rog is almost as ill-equipped to deal with the affair as Emerson is to combat bullies.
As Emerson relentlessly pursues Don, you worry that at any moment “Whole New Thing” will collapse into a clanking melodrama about suspected pedophilia and small-town paranoia. To its enormous credit, the movie remains on high ground. It recognizes that growing pains don’t inevitably lead to scandal and catastrophe. They are discomforts to be endured for as long as they last. If you’re lucky, they can also be valuable learning experiences.
WHOLE NEW THING
Opens today in Manhattan.
Directed by Amnon Buchbinder; written by Mr. Buchbinder and Daniel MacIvor; director of photography, Christopher Ball; edited by Angela Baker; music by David Buchbinder; production designer, Bill Fleming; produced by Camelia Frieberg and Kelly Bray; released by Picture This! Entertainment. At the Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 92 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Aaron Webber (Emerson), Robert Joy (Rog), Rebecca Jenkins (Kaya), Daniel MacIvor (Don), Kathryn MacLellan (Ms. McPherson) and Drew O’Hara (Todd).
Back to articles
April 6, 2007
By Stephen Holden - New York Times
“Whole New Thing,” a minutely observed family drama about a hothouse flower transplanted into the wild outdoors, is the rare film in which the actors playing parents and child feel biologically connected. That flower, the 13-year-old Emerson Thorsen (Aaron Webber), is the haughty, home-schooled only child of a bohemian couple living in a house they built in the Nova Scotia woods.
If its portrait of hippie parents raising a misfit child has much in common with Rebecca Miller’s “Ballad of Jack and Rose,” “Whole New Thing” refrains from going to the same extremes.
Directed by Amnon Buchbinder from a screenplay he wrote with Daniel MacIvor, this movie is a more conventional, but also more believable, exploration of the potential cost of thumbing your nose at society. If first-generation rebels have their principles to fall back on, for their children, it suggests, it’s often a different story.
Emerson’s father, Rog (Robert Joy), a scientific visionary, has staked his future on a yet-to-be-perfected system for recycling human waste. Money is scarce, and the Thorsens’ marriage is also suffering from Rog’s sexual neglect of his earthy wife, Kaya (Rebecca Jenkins).
When Kaya insists that Emerson attend a local public school and experience the real world, the intellectually precocious boy — who has written (by hand) a thousand-page novel about hobbits — receives a rude shock. Arrogant, snooty and entitled, and resembling an androgynous, long-haired Harry Potter, Emerson encounters bullies for the first time.
Mr. Webber’s exquisite performance makes this virginal boy, who gives massages to his parents’ friends, at once insufferable and endearing. The smartest student in his middle-school English class, he ridicules the book the class is studying, “Snowboard Snowjob.” The sympathetic teacher, Don Grant (Mr. MacIvor), promptly substitutes “As You Like It,” and immediately you sense a boost in the class’s academic level.
Emerson, whose unformed, uncertain sexuality is just beginning to emerge, develops a serious crush on Don and pursues his quarry with a reckless single-mindedness. Don, a lonely gay man acutely aware of appropriate student-teacher boundaries, takes his pleasure at a public restroom frequented by gay men while trying to fend off his panting young admirer.
The movie adroitly parallels Emerson’s pursuit of Don with Kaya’s impulsive affair with a working-class neighbor who attends one of the Thorsens’ parties. Rog is almost as ill-equipped to deal with the affair as Emerson is to combat bullies.
As Emerson relentlessly pursues Don, you worry that at any moment “Whole New Thing” will collapse into a clanking melodrama about suspected pedophilia and small-town paranoia. To its enormous credit, the movie remains on high ground. It recognizes that growing pains don’t inevitably lead to scandal and catastrophe. They are discomforts to be endured for as long as they last. If you’re lucky, they can also be valuable learning experiences.
WHOLE NEW THING
Opens today in Manhattan.
Directed by Amnon Buchbinder; written by Mr. Buchbinder and Daniel MacIvor; director of photography, Christopher Ball; edited by Angela Baker; music by David Buchbinder; production designer, Bill Fleming; produced by Camelia Frieberg and Kelly Bray; released by Picture This! Entertainment. At the Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 92 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Aaron Webber (Emerson), Robert Joy (Rog), Rebecca Jenkins (Kaya), Daniel MacIvor (Don), Kathryn MacLellan (Ms. McPherson) and Drew O’Hara (Todd).
Back to articles