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L.I.E.
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The most insidious evil enables itself by confessing to itself, expiating itself, and absolving itself, free to sin once more -- this hideous truth is the hypnotic driver underlying the profoundly disturbing film L.I.E.
Not long before our story opens, 15-year-old Howie's mother was killed on a Long Island Expressway car crash, leaving him introverted, confused, and vulnerable. His crooked HUD-property-builder father Marty (Bruce Altman) is either physically or emotionally absent, insulting his dead wife's memory by indulging in lighted-window-observable sex-game romps. So Howie (Paul Franklin Dano, a remarkable young actor) is on his own, easy prey both for baiting punk friends and, more insidiously, for Big John Henry Harrigan (Brian Cox).
Fifty-five-year-old Big John is a white-haired Marine Vietnam vet now back home in Dix Hills. Caught in a perpetual 70's feedback loop, he inhabits a self-made world mixing kitsch (his doorbell plays the Marine Corp anthem, his carpeting is olive-and-avocado shag) and exotica (black silk kimonos, ivory-handled pistols from the North Vietnamese Army) that is reassuring yet seductive.
Doomed by his face to play only corrupted or corruptible characters, Cox (Hermann Goering in NUREMBERG) carries the film. He tools residential suburban streets in his finned hot-sauce-orange Trans Am (one expects an eight-track playing disco), its low throbbing engines conveying menace. He circles Howie as a shark to a seal pup, endlessly patient, endlessly focused, approaching and withdrawing, brushing and then bumping -- by turns hearty and seductive, parental and predatory, absurd and deadly. A modern emotional vampire, he sucks life from his young victims even though he may never touch them except in loco parentis. His compelling and nauseating performance makes us accessories before the fact in what future crimes we know not. In so doing, Big John shows that same-sex child abuse can be even more heinous than heterosexual because it so deftly conceals desire in the guise of teaching, comforting, befriending, big-brotherhood.
This review is a grudgingly enthusiastic endorsement even as it is not necessarily a recommendation to go. This movie intends to upset you, and it succeeds.
Though its visuals are PG and its dialog no worse than the opening credits in a teen gangsta film, this film is astonishingly rated NC-17. In so branding the movie, the board has done the movie-going public a massive disservice -- if there is any audience who should see L.I.E., it is fifteen-year-old disaffected nihilist insecure boys.