Americanized Dickens: B+ Bonnet
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — The Good Son
abishai_gangulee — 9 years ago(September 12, 2016 06:40 PM)
Macaulay Culkin is most remembered for his delightfully smart role as the young resourceful and valiant boy Kevin from the Christmas film
Home Alone
.
However, in
The Good Son
, Culkin exhibits great range and offers us a very sinister and dark-spirited young boy who unnerves our sensibilities about community security.
Elijah Wood offers a nice complement as a worrying young boy who is the only one to recognize the evil of Culkin's character.
Culkin plays Henry Evans and Wood plays his brother Mark.
Henry is, in a lot of ways, sort of like a darker rendition of Artful Dodger (the street-wise pickpocket who befriends and 'guides' the young boy Oliver Twist from the famous Dickens novel about orphanages and etiquette).
Henry provides an overview of the paranoia themes in this film (not unlike what Dodger does for the Dickens novel), and through Culkin's characterization of Henry, we see an eerie portrait of 'strangers in our town.'
This is an under-appreciated achievement for Macaulay Culkin, and it gets to some of the intriguing 'anti-romance hellfire' themes found in many modern paranoia films such as
The Wolf of Wall Street
and
The Crazies
.
Artful Dodger:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artful_Dodger