Boy is Taika Waitit's Best And Most Emotionally Resonant Feature

Back in the 1984, a child known only as Boy (James Rolleston), who is the figure this 2010 feature is named after, lives out a pretty normal life for an adolescent on the cusp of being a teenager. He loves Michael Jackson, has a small but close group of friends and also yearns for his father to come back into his life. For years, Boy has been telling anyone who would listen these tales about his father's great deeds from the past and that's helped build up his father to be some kind of mythic figure in the mind of Boy. So when his dad, Alamein (Taika Waititi) shows up again out of the blue, well, Boy is as happy as can be, he's just so excited to have his father back into his life and it seems like his dad is happy to see him too.


It's clear from the get-go that Alamein, who now spends his day in a gang whose number of members tops out at three, isn't the most clean-cut guy, but he's willing to spend time with Boy while he and his mates try to search for some money Alamein buried before he went to prison. Boy doesn't pick up on any of the more negative traits his father exhibits of course, he's too elated to spend any and all time with his dad, to the point that he begins to imitate some of Alamein's more unsavory characteristics and also shun his friends in favor of hanging out his newly resurfaced dad. The story of Boy follows these various father-and-son experiences that are far from the idealistic reunion Boy was hoping for.

Serving as the second feature film Taika Waititi would write and direct, Boy provides probably the most dramatic movie of Waititi's filmography. Humor is certainly around in the film, with a recurring gag of Alamein describing the then brand-new movie E.T. to his son, who hasn't seen this Steven Spielberg film, being especially guffaw-worthy, but this feels like the most poignant piece of cinema Waititi has created yet as a filmmaker. Placing a greater emphasis on pathos turns out to be a tonal stretch the New Zealand director is quite skilled at considering how emotionally powerful Boy turns out to be.

The tale itself takes place, as far as I can recall, entirely from Boy's perspective, which means we get an interestingly realistic take on how a child reacts to being caught in up the complex world of adult drama. Boy frequently imagines his father being a figure of grandeur, to the point that he even has on-screen visions of his dad being a war hero or taking out potential gangsters with ease, which makes it all the more tragic when Boy responds with glee to the sight of his father, whom an adult viewer can clearly see is an immature fellow whose only around not to fulfill his son's desire for a father figure in his life but rather for self-serving financial purposes.

Playing the absentee father is Taika Waititi himself and it's a fascinating role for the guy to play given how he's played charming goofballs in his most prominent acting work in his other directorial efforts. Here though, Waititi excels portraying an authentic portrait of a deadbeat dad who's never matured to the point of being a proper dad. Alamein's sophomoric tendencies manifest in lifelike ways that make him feel like a true representation of how these kind of dads behave which fits snugly into the movies overall more naturalistic aesthetic. Also faring well on the acting front is James Rolleston as the titular lead character with Rolleston lending similarity remarkable authenticity to his portrayal of a child coming to terms with how the real version of his dad may not line up with the one he's imagined for all these years.

The two lead actors inhabit a script that's able to keep the plot moving at a solid clip without sacrificing the realistic nature of the story in favor of a hurried narrative. It's also notable just how well the Waititi's writing is able to blend humor and emotional potency from certain plot details, namely Boy's pet goat. Getting chuckles and sorrow out of these facets of the film without it feeling like a bunch of tonal dissonance is a tremendous feat and it's far from the only way Boy, which may be my favorite of all of Taika Waititi's directorial efforts, impresses in its own appropriately quiet and realistic way.