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Paul Franklin Dano stars as a confused (literally, queer), "special" (literally, poetry-writing queer) fifteen-year-old boy. Like the filmmaker, Dano's character transforms the Long Island Expressway into a traffic jam of existential symbolism. His mother having died in a car accident on the L.I.E., his rich father has brought a "bimbo" into their sterile-clean house. Cuesta writes in - imposes - layers of lies beneath the upper-middle-class veneer. Son is in the closet and involved in a gang of boys pilfering the wealthy homes in the neighborhood. Father is involved in some shady business dealings. Father's girlfriend, we are told though never shown, is "not a bimbo." Dano is in love with his best friend, played by Billy Kay as a wet dream of lower-class adolescence. A veritable "XY" model, Kay nearly relinquishes to his role as a posing object of desire. It turns out that not only does he toy with Dano's emotions and manipulate him into robbing houses, but he's also a prostitute.
That makes his film's spectators an audience of johns. Perhaps that explains why Cuesta makes so sympathetic one of Kay's clients and Dano's eventual father surrogate, a pedophile played by Brian Cox. Cuesta never uses the indie-film cliché of the sympathetic pedophile to raise spectator self-awareness or to challenge audience moral precepts. Viewed through the perspective of emotionally needy Dano, who Cuesta positions to deflect audience identification with Cox, Cox's character validates Cuesta's exploitation of Dano and Kay's youthful sexuality. Cox, whose name in the credits caused giggles throughout the audience, gets juicy moments that flawlessly achieve Cuesta's intended affects. In one, he cruelly uses condescension to cut down his anti-Semitic kept boy toy. In another, he expresses astonishment and genuine admiration that Dano quotes Whitman. Finally, he declines Dano's sexual advances, complicating the initial conception of him as entirely bad or dangerous. However, because Cuesta fails to humanize the homicidal kept boy or the lower-class Kay, the film actually concurs with the value judgements of Cox's character. "I am ashamed," Cox says poignantly. In his need for audience validation, Cuesta is shameless. Cuesta, speaking after the screening, claims artistic ambiguity but describes it as "keeping the audience on the edge of its seat." Cuesta's pretense of gritty realism - of truth - is the film's biggest lie. His attempts to hoodwink the audience expose the material as exploitation. Like most exploitation films, L.I.E. unintentionally reveals unsettling truths about what audiences accept at the movies - and, by extension, in our social structures.
Like co-star Dano, Kay displays a daring willingness to express the complexity and emotions of adolescent sexuality. Pinning Dano to the ground, Kay says into the camera, positioned at Dano's point of view, "Come with me." Kay follows up this teasing command by letting saliva dangle from his mouth. and then sucking it back up. Some kind of collective adolescent memory seems touched upon; anyone in the audience - queer or straight, male or female - must share the characters' tingle in his/her genitals. Such moments, however, eventually go limp. Cuesta allows for piquant instants of character-audience identification, but cheapens those emotions by never exploring or expanding them. Nor does he let such moments resonate with each other organically. One suggestive moment shows Dano putting on his mother's makeup while he hears his father having sex. Some may not know that it's actually an exploitative rip-off and reduction of a beautiful scene in Francois Truffaut's 1959 masterpiece about adolescence, The 400 Blows. In it, Jean-Pierre Leaud as the straight Antoine Doinel spends part of his time home alone from school experimenting with his estranged mother's makeup. Generations of filmgoers have felt that they've grown up along with Doinel (and Leaud) through a series of Truffaut films. L.I.E. won't outlast the trip from the theater. Cuesta takes advantage of cultural ignorance and amnesia to feign originality. Such ploys, even if not individually identified, eventually resound in an unmistakable imaginative flaccidity.
Brian Cox as Big John Harrigan with Paul Franklin Dano in L.I.E.
The scenes of forced parallel editing are the most obvious examples of Cuesta's banality. Cuesta crosscuts between Dano and Kay at each other's homes, coalescing the overt and subconscious themes of class difference. The montage ends with Kay looking in a mirror and pinching his nipple, Dano looking in a mirror examining the bruises on his face caused by his father's fist. Character exploitation mirrors filmmaker exploitation. Finally, Cuesta crosscuts the confrontations between two pairs of characters, paralleling the results of their expression of need. It ends with Cox's character murdered and suggests a psychic rebirth in Dano's poetic declaration about the Long Island Expressway: "I'm not gonna let it get me." Cuesta's noxious metaphors and polluting lies have already got him. |
Paul Franklin Dano as Howie Blitzer taking a walk over the Long Island Expressway 
Billy Kay (left) plays Gary Terrio who manipulates Howie's feelings 
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