Sometimes you don’t get what you want, but you get what you need. Especially in coming-of-age movies.
In “The Exchange,” now on VOD, teenager Tim Long (Ed Oxenbould) was born and has lived his entire life in a small Ontario town, but feels like an outsider. Obsessed with all things French, he’s a student of Camus, worships Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, and looks down on his school mates and even family. The feeling is mutual. “Bookworm” and “loser” are two of the nicer jabs thrown his way. “Everyone hates you,” says Gary (Justin Hartley) the school’s soccer coach. The only person Tim really likes is Brenda (Jayli Wolf), who is unaware of his crush.
Craving sophisticated company, he signs up for an exchange program to acquire a “mail order best friend.” He’s hoping the exchange student will be a Gallic breath of fresh air in his stale little town. But instead of an erudite tour guide to all thing French he gets Stéphane (Avan Jogia), a teenage chain-smoking horndog more interested in girls than Gruyère Gougères.
After making a splash in town Stéphane’s behavior soon starts to raise eyebrows until he finds an unlikely supporter.
“The Exchange” is based on a true story. Screenwriter Tim Long, a Canadian from Manitoba who has been the consulting producer of “The Simpsons” for twenty plus years, adapts his own awkward friendship with an exchange student as the basis for the story. I’m sure characters are amplified and situations blown out of proportion, but underneath it all “The Exchange” is a feel-good story with laughs and a great deal of heart.
It’s lighthearted but that doesn’t prevent “The Exchange” from adding denser textures to the story. Near the end Long and director Dan Mazer (longtime writing partner of Sacha Baron Cohen) tackle the xenophobia that informs the latter part of the movie. After a brief moment of celebrity in town, the tide turns against Stéphane due to veiled racism. He is, as the Gallophile Tim might have said, l’étranger, an outsider whose motives are questioned, simply because he wasn’t born in the local hospital. It gets sorted—“We drew certain conclusions about you being different,” a character says to him—and is handled delicately, but in our divided times it hits the nail on the head.
Ultimately “The Exchange” works because it is about empathy. It’s funny, with the kind of premise that could have been sitcom fodder, but beyond the laughs is a bigger message of acceptance.
Paul Dano needs no introduction as an actor. In front of the camera the Golden Globe nominee has impressed with powerful performances in films like “There Will Be Blood,” “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Love & Mercy.” He brings a similar quiet intensity to his directorial debut, “Wildlife,” a dysfunctional family drama adapted from Richard Ford’s disquieting 1990 novel of the same name.
Set in 1960s Montana, the story focuses on the frustrated Jeanette Brinson (Carey Mulligan), alcoholic husband, Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), and 14-year-old son Joe (Ed Oxenbould). When Jerry gets fired from his golf pro country club gig he’s forced to take a job fighting wildfires, a dangerous occupation that only pays $1 an hour. With her husband gone most of the time Jeanette wanders, beginning an affair with car dealership owner Warren Miller (Bill Camp). “You’re mother is a very passionate dancer,” says Miller. “Did you know that Joe?” With his parents occupied Joe becomes a de facto parent to them both, struggling to keep them together as their relationship hits the rocks.
Dano, who co-wrote “Wildlife” with actress and significant other Zoe Kazan, provides an elegant showcase for Mulligan’s soul-searching performance. The story of this quickly unraveling family is meted out slowly, deliberately low key, in an effort to allow the audience to get under the skin of the three main characters. Bonded by blood and marriage they struggle with unity in an era of change.
At the heart of it is Mulligan. As an Eisenhower Era wife and mother she projects an aura of calm but is actually a churning vessel of emotions; a person clamouring for more. The cracks in her Norman Rockwell façade are beginning to show. “Do you like Mr. Miller?” asks Joe. “Not very much,” she replies. “Things do happen around him though. He has that feel about him.” Mulligan breathes life into Jeanette, subtly and believably portraying a woman coming of age.
Oxenbould as Joe, the son forced to become both protector and confidant to his mother—“This is my desperation dress,” she says to him, modelling a revealing frock—is also very good, effectively showing us the dissolution of his parent’s bond through his eyes. His character doesn’t grow, he is an observer, a conduit for the audience’s sympathy.
Despite the title “Wildlife” doesn’t exactly kick up its heels. It’s a chilly tale with a few unnecessary detours—like Joe’s after school job and his friendship with a female classmate—but its story of survival hits home.
Unsafe parenting. Reckless driving. A stoned teenager. No, it’s not the long awaited sequel to Larry Clark’s “Kids,” it’s the latest family fare from Disney.
Alexander Cooper (Ed Oxenbould) is having a bad day. It’s the eve of his twelfth birthday and nothing is going right. He got gum stuck in his hair, he almost burns down the science lab at school and worst of all, no one is going to come to his birthday party because Phillip Parker, “a really cool kid with a hot tub and ADHD,” has scheduled a wild bash for the same night.
Things are going well for the rest of the family. Teen brother Anthony (Dylan Minnette) is taking the “hottest girl in school” to the prom and is about to get his driver’s license. Sister Emily (Kerris Dorsey) is about to star in a school production of “Peter Pan,” mom (Jennifer Garner) is due for a promotion and dad (Steve Carell) has a promising job interview.
Feeling down, Alexander makes a birthday wish. He wants everyone to know what it is like to have a “horrible, terrible, no good day.” Soon Emily gets a cold on the day of her performance, Anthony gets a zit and domestic chaos reigns.
The obvious joke to make about “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” would be to suggest that it should be retitled “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Movie.” But that would be disingenuous. It’s not terribly interesting, but it’s also not terrible, horrible, no good or very bad.
It’s gently paced family fare with a few genuine laughs and few surprises. Carell and Jennifer Garner are the most good-natured parents ever—when Emily vomits on dad after taking too much cough medicine he says, “Oh. I bet that felt good.”—and from that blossoms some funny situations and lines—“I’m going to need you to make an incredible effort on the potty tomorrow.”—but all are in service of the movie’s central theme that everybody has bad days.
Many of the situations don’t really feel organic. Instead they feel like set-ups to gags, outrageous filler—look Carell’s on fire!—to keep us interested until the inevitable happy ending.
Parents won’t find much to hold their attention in “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” but younger kids will likely get a kick out of the bad behavior on display. “Kids” it ain’t, although the Cooper children seem to get away with everything just short of murder.
