This Boy’s Life is based on author Tobias Wolf’s autobiographical memoir about growing up in the Fifties in the company of his divorced and seemingly footloose mom Caroline (Barkin). The movie opens up as panoramic camera movements sweep through Monument Valley to the strains of the Chairman of the Board singing “Let’s take a boat to Bermuda/Let’s take a train to St. Paul.” Toby (DiCaprio) and his mom, who has just fled from an abusive boyfriend on the East coast, are on a fool’s quest in a broken-down car to prospect for uranium in Utah. Subsequently, one dream keeps being supplanted by the next until Toby and Caroline land in Seattle where we find Caroline out of ideas and unwilling any longer to just pick up and go. So when a solid Joe named Dwight (De Niro) from Concrete, Washington wants to marry Caroline and take a hand in parenting her increasingly delinquent adolescent son Toby, Caroline accepts his offer. And thus begins the movie’s other thematic: Toby’s desperate need for paternal influence which is unfortunately matched with Dwight’s sick mind games. Underneath the surface of Dwight’s upright guy who sports some pretentiously amusing mannerisms, lies a borderline psychotic who becomes Toby’s arch nemesis. (In, curiously, the movie’s only sequence that is not told from Toby’s point of view, we additionally witness Dwight’s sexual humiliation of his bride Caroline on their wedding night.) Though all the performances in This Boy’s Life are good, it’s at this point in the story that the legendary De Niro takes over and we begin to have a situation in which the story’s antagonist becomes more interesting than the protagonists. Barkin’s Caroline, who initially seemed like such a marvelous Fifties free-spirit character, gets lost in the mix and ends up a sideline cipher. Director Caton-Jones (Scandal, Memphis Belle) once again shows his flair for period detail though he never here exerts his grip on the human drama. This Boy’s Life is a very violent story; the abuse is both psychic and physical and always present or, ar least, imminent, which gives the movie a highly uncomfortable edge. Thus, by the movie’s final blow-out, the tension has become almost unbearable though it’s less from curiosity about what will happen to the characters than a feeling that you just can’t abide watching such abuse a minute longer. And that means you’re itching to get out of the theatre which, it’s safe to say, was not one of this movie’s goals.
This article appears in April 30 • 1993 (Cover).