Michelle Trachtenberg

Mysterious Skin DVD

Mysterious SkinGrade: B+ | Genre: Independent

Summary: Mysterious Skin is a rough film to take in and process, but just like enduring the pain of a marathon you get a strange sense of satisfaction from starring into the void of these lives to pull out the people buried inside.

The human mind is a complex bundle of neurons and synapses spastically firing away, serving as the air traffic control tower for the mess of complexity that is the human body. What happens when you take this finely tuned instrument and force it to digest images and actions no human was ever meant to experience? Does it reach its breaking point and simply sputter to a halt? Does it revolt, cutting into the fundamentals of personality and its own self-preservation instinct? How do you unbreak the egg and return the yolk to its shell? Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin explores this topic with savage brutality and careful grace. This cross current of contradictions are what make Skin such a compelling portrait to behold.

First I must roll out the obligatory disclaimer. This film is tagged with an NC-17 rating for good reason. There are disturbing scenes of violent sex as well as strong allusions of pedophilic acts. Our main character is a hustler selling his body to deviant and depraved men similar to River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho. Those furiously clutching onto homophobic tendencies will be spewing up a litany of hatred so don’t look to Skin to help you quell your bigotry. It’s much too in your face. For those still standing, I do apologize for the abrupt audience weeding out. I remember going to see Rules of Attraction at the theatre and an usher coming in and warning us beforehand that many of us wouldn’t be able to take it. At the time, I thought he was an ass for doing so, but then again my tolerance for gritty realism is eons above the average moviegoer. So let me reiterate the fact that Skin is a good film, yet one you need to approach with caution.

Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Elisabeth Shue, Michelle Trachtenberg & Bill Sage

Director: Gregg Araki

Mysterious Skin is a story told in slices of time with a line of narration connecting us to the present. We start in the early 80s, introduced to two young boys who play on the same Little League baseball team. Both boys are in strained family situations that leave them vulnerable to their coach to prey on. Coach (Bill Sage) brings Neil back to his place for video games and pantries hemorrhaging with junk food. It is a kid’s paradise that no adult would actually be living in. Red flags start popping up in your head, waving like bloody mad, as the coach puts Neil in ever more compromising positions that lead you to watching this pedophiles’ fantasies spin into reality. Thankfully, we cut away, but you can’t escape the unsettling images Araki imbeds in your head. He’s almost too good at completing a scene without ever having to show it. Brian, our second boy, starts having mysterious blackouts, awakening with a bloody nose. After witnessing a UFO one evening, it sets his young mind rolling that these gaps in time must be alien abductions.

Then we cut ahead to the boys kicked forward into their late teenage years. Brian (Brady Corbet) is the definition of a dork with those 80s glasses that are bigger than his head, sitting under comb-challenged hair. He’s enthralled with UFO abductions, contacting a local girl who claims she was taken and keeping a dream journal to help him unearth his own spacey journey, festering in his unconscious. Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is grungy man candy with his euro trash look and scruffy Beatles mop top. He is gay, brash and sick with confidence, unintentionally drawing in all those who surround him with his aloof and edgy way. His taste for risk coupled with being a gay male with zero outlets for sex in small town America cause him to turn to hustling. Soon he isn’t content servicing the small pond anymore, and he jumps to hustling in New York City where he pickles his soul with deviance and life threatening danger. Meanwhile, Brian seeks out his old boyhood teammate who keeps cropping up in his dreams, thinking he was abducted as well and may hold the answers to the missing chunks of his life.

Araki has assembled a very nice picture. It is dirty to fit the darker subject matter, yet it is also visually stunning in its accents whether its Brian’s mom decapitating bottles with bullets or Neil and Wendy (Michelle Trachtenberg) hearing God through the drive-in speakers as the sky births snow. These small touches really make a rich film that subtly churns just beneath your notice. The soundtrack is notable as well for its ambient audio landscapes. It is the collaboration of Cocteau Twin’s guitarist Robin Guthrie and composer Harold Budd that exquisitely sets the mood for these complex emotional scenes. This movie couldn’t have been as strong without the powerful performances by Gordon-Levitt and Corbet. They portrayed the gruesome scars of youth with mystic bewilderment, not knowing why they are f%$ked up, just knowing that they are.

Araki creates a very compelling portrait of stomach turning subject matter. As we’ve seen with recent years releases, The Woodsman and Capturing the Friedmans, it’s tough to see these demented child abusers as anything other than monsters. Mysterious Skin focuses on the victim to see how one tragic event can paint every aspect of a person’s life that follows it. It is a rough film to take in and process, but just like enduring the pain of a marathon you get a strange sense of satisfaction from starring into the void of these lives to pull out the people buried inside.