RetroPost is a weekly repost of an older Christ and Pop Culture that has some relevance to current pop culture events or releases. <\/em><\/p>\n This Week: Son of Rambow is the rare brilliant movie that you\u2019ve almost certainly never seen. Fortunately for you, it\u2019s now available on Netflix Instant Watch. To celebrate the movie\u2019s new availability, we feature Carissa\u2019s plea on its\u2019 behalf. Summer is the time for big-budget movies; it\u2019s also apparently the season when we, in the eyes of studios, should prefer to watch escapist fantasy (not that fantasy is necessarily escapist, but studios seem to think that\u2019s its primary value). So how about taking an hour and a half this summer to celebrate the ultimate cinematic fantasy: the dream that a community will actually recognize and embrace the talent and vision of an obscure and unlikely moviemaker? Such is the dream at the center of Son of Rambow<\/em>, the first film written by The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy<\/em> director Garth Jennings (who also directs here). Son of Rambow<\/em> is ultimately uneven in quality, veering off into melodrama by its end, but even with its visible seams, it\u2019s by far preferable to most of summer\u2019s film-by-numbers offerings.<\/p>\n Son of Rambow<\/em> was released in the summer of 2008, but unless you live in Los Angeles or New York, you probably had no chance to see it until it was released on DVD. Set in 1980s Britain, the film focuses on two very different boys who become fascinated with First Blood<\/em>, the movie that introduced the world to Sylvester Stallone\u2019s Rambo. One of the boys, Lee Carter (Will Poulter, soon to be seen as Eustace Clarence Scrubb in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader<\/em>), is the archetypal school troublemaker, though he also dreams of making a film and entering it in a young filmmakers\u2019 competition. Will Proudfoot, on the other hand, is quiet and well-behaved; he belongs to a strict religious sect called \u201cthe Brethren\u201d (it\u2019s not really clear whether they\u2019re supposed to be the Plymouth Brethren) that forbids its members from watching movies. The boys meet when Lee, forcibly expelled from his classroom by a teacher, lobs a tennis ball at Will, who has been sent into the hallway while the rest of his class watches a documentary. Despite this inauspicious beginning, Lee soon manages to recruit Will as an \u201cextra\u201d for his film.<\/p>\n It\u2019s while Will is over at Lee\u2019s house that he catches his first glimpses of video clips from First Blood<\/em>. For some reason, either the character of Rambo or the new (to him) medium of film\u2014or perhaps both\u2014further inspires his own artistic endeavors: fanciful drawings covering his sketchbook and the walls of the boys\u2019 bathroom. These drawings, under the influence of Rambo, begin to take on the frame of a story in which Will, as the son of \u201cRambow\u201d (the misspelling presumably reflects Will\u2019s ignorance of pop culture), tries to rescue his father from an evil scarecrow\u2014with the assistance of a flying dog, no less. Lee agrees to use Will\u2019s stories and artistic concepts as the basis for his film.<\/p>\n Son of Rambow<\/em> could have easily become a film exploring the effect of violent movies on young boys, and perhaps that film would also have been interesting\u2014but this is not that film. The real film takes for granted the boys\u2019 assumption that Rambo is a worthy basis for their own cinematic masterpiece, and that\u2019s fine. The real focus of the movie has to do with art and community. Lee and Will, despite their differences, are brought together into a partnership through their shared vision; that partnership is challenged when the boys disagree about whether their moviemaking should be opened up to the participation of a larger community. Didier, the popular French foreign-exchange student who swaggers through the school with a posse of English imitators in tow, discovers Will\u2019s sketchbook and asks to be in the movie. Suddenly the two-person projects swells to a full cast and crew.<\/p>\n One of the most refreshing things about Son of Rambow<\/em> is how Lee, Didier, and Didier\u2019s followers all recognize Will\u2019s giftedness and, despite his youth, his less-than-imposing physical stature, and his \u201cweird\u201d religious background, place themselves under his artistic leadership. Son of Rambow<\/em> challenges us to remember the possibilities of childhood, rather than its pressures: especially the possibility that others will recognize talent and respect it accordingly. (The flipside is also presented in a later scene in the movie, in which we see Didier, who has been idolized by the English schoolboys, experiencing the utter scorn of his French schoolmates\u2014popularity, Son of Rambow<\/em> suggests, is largely an accident of circumstance, but talent has a chance of transcending circumstance.)<\/p>\n However, the film never really deals with the question of whether Will\u2019s artistry is unique because of his strict religious background. The Brethren, for Will, seem to be defined by their prohibitions more than their faith-propositions\u2014and that\u2019s quite possibly the way a child would view such a sect. Whether it intends to or not, however, the film asks us to consider how Will\u2019s lack of media exposure has shaped his art for the better. When he does discover film, the medium excites him and adds to his creativity, but it might not have been such an inspiration had movies been a part of his life from birth; even Rambo might have been merely flashing images and background noise to him.<\/p>\n Though Son of Rambow<\/em> ultimately doesn\u2019t wrestle enough with the questions of how Will\u2019s faith community and his new artistic community should intersect\u2014it\u2019s implied that Will\u2019s family will simply leave the Brethren, at least in part for his sake\u2014I think it might be a particularly worthwhile film for those whose religious background restricted their participation in the arts, whether as observers or creators. Having never been in that position myself, I\u2019m hesitant to judge how meaningful the film would be for others from a stricter upbringing, but I think it could help us all to remember that restrictions don\u2019t always suppress our gifts; sometimes they call forth our gifts in new and unexpected ways. Again, I think Son of Rambow<\/em> would be much more substantial and satisfying if it really explored the reasons that the Brethren opposed movies\u2014and whether, in this particular community, they could somehow support their young brother without compromising the essentials of their faith. These are the tensions that we live out as Christians engaged in arts and pop culture, and these are the kind of questions some obscure summer movie near you (or, possibly, far from you) may be raising, even if they don\u2019t always provide satisfactory answers.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Now available on Netflix Instant Watch, Son of Rambow is a different kind of action-influenced film.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1236,"featured_media":8089,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8,11,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-film","category-headline","category-retropost"],"yoast_head":"\n
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