Top Gap. See more gaps ». Create a list ». Movies to watch. Wake up, it's time. He uses to tell his parents and his relations that, when he was 8 years old, five hours disappeared from his life. He is convinced that he was abducted by aliens and makes the acquaintance of Avalyn Friesen, a young woman also pretending to have been abducted, who urges him to investigate his past and to write down his dreams.
Brian will finally understand that the answer to his questions has something to do with the baseball team and he decides to find Neil, the best player of the team then. At nineteen, Neil is broodingly narcissistic, emotionally hard and closed off and withdrawn into himself. He has become a hustler, compulsively turning tricks with older men who remind him of the coach, turned on by the impersonality and occasional abuse of these encounters, and seemingly indifferent to their dangers AIDS, and sometimes direct physical harm.
Gordon-Levitt and Corbet make the gaps and absences present, as it were, in their performances. At the end, Brian finally finds Neil, who fills him in on what happened to them both a decade earlier. Brian learns the truth, and Neil realizes for the first time how great was the emotional cost of what happened.
The abuse itself is troublingly ambiguous: though it unquestionably did harm to both boys the film is in no way an apologia for sex with minors , this harm cannot be separated from who they are and what they have become.
The coach is not presented as a monster; for all his creepiness, we can see what Neil loved in him. The closing scenes are among the most transcendent, beautiful and tender scenes I've witnessed in a film on this subject and Levitt pulls them off to perfect as does Corbet. As the abusive baseball coach, Bill Sage offers a performance somewhat reminiscent of Kevin Bacon in last year's "The Woodsman. His classic, all-American looks complement this approach beautifully.
In supporting roles, Elisabeth Shue portrays Neil's mother, a woman so wrapped up in her own drama that she can say "I love you" but doesn't have a clue how to really show it.
As Wendy, Neil's "soul mate", Michelle Trachtenberg breaks away from much of her kiddie fare and does more with the glance, a gesture than many actresses do with an entire scene. Survivors will notice the difference between Elisabeth Shue's "I love you" as she goes out the door yet again and Coach's "I love you" as he pays more and more and more attention to young Neil. Survivors will cringe at the signs that are so obvious, yet missed Araki paces the film beautifully, allowing for those moments of emotional release through laughter and tenderness and pain and sorrow.
The film includes a haunting musical score by Robin Guthrie, guitarist for the Cocteau Twins. Production design is simple, yet effective and other supporting roles are performed with perfection, including a few you will immediately look at, recognize and go "Wow! I'm numb. I realize, wholeheartedly, that this film is not perfect
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