THE GOOD SON

  • (Has redeeming facet) Directed by Joseph Ruben Written by Ian McEwan With Macaulay Culkin, Elijah Wood, Wendy Crewson, David Morse, Daniel Hugh Kelly, and Quinn Culkin.

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The hero of The Good Son is another boy of roughly the same age, Mark (Elijah Wood), living in the southwest, who has been traumatized by the recent death of his mother. Shortly before she dies she tells him, “I’ll always be with you,” and Mark interprets this to mean that she’ll come back to him as someone else. After the funeral Mark’s father (David Morse) discovers he has to go to Tokyo on important business, and Mark’s uncle (Daniel Hugh Kelly) convinces him to leave Mark with him and his family at their house in Maine for the few weeks he’ll be away. After befriending his cousin Henry (Culkin), Mark gradually discovers a streak of gratuitous cruelty in him to which everyone else–uncle, aunt (Wendy Crewson), Henry’s kid sister Connie (Culkin’s kid sister Quinn), and a local child psychologist (Jacqueline Brookes)–is completely oblivious. Meanwhile, Mark becomes convinced that his aunt, who is still grieving the apparently accidental death of her youngest child, is the reincarnation of his mother.

I’ve never read William March’s novel The Bad Seed or seen the popular Maxwell Anderson play derived from it, but I can still recall the ludicrous way the play was turned into a Hollywood movie in 1956. The title heroine, played by Patty McCormack, was an eight-year-old murderer in pigtails, and when her mother discovered the girl’s monstrous nature and crimes, she gave her an overdose of sleeping pills and then took her own life. The play’s surprise twist was that the girl survived, presumably free to go on killing. The producers of the movie clearly found this macabre conclusion unthinkable–not surprisingly, given the premium placed on middle-class childhood innocence in the 50s–so they thoughtfully arranged to have their homicidal heroine dispatched by a bolt of lightning. And then, to show they were only fooling, they ended the movie with a literal curtain call for the actors, resurrecting the mother (Nancy Kelly) so she could jokingly punish the girl with a good, sound spanking.