by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched a
Lifetime movie together, and it proved to be an unexpectedly good one: Lost
Boy, a 2015 production
directed by Tara Miele (whose superb atmospherics and the performances she gets
from her actors score yet another point for women directors) from a script by
Jennifer Maisel. The story premise has a family resemblance to another Lifetime
movie from years ago, When Andrew Came Home (2000) in that both center around a grieving
mother who suddenly comes face-to-face with her long-lost son who disappeared
years before — only where the boy in Andrew definitely is her long-lost son and he’s still well within pre-pubescence (Andrew
disappeared at 5 and returned at 10), the situation in Lost Boy is played more powerfully for ambiguity and the
kid, Mitchell Harris (Matthew Fahey), disappeared at 6 and (presumably)
reappeared at 17, about to be emancipated and in the full flush of sexual
maturity. During the years her son has been gone, mom Laura Harris (Virginia
Madsen from the cast of Sideways, top-billed) has become a major advocate for the parents of missing
children, and she’s been able to help other parents handle the reunification of
their families even while her own son still remains among the missing. Alas,
her home life hasn’t been so happy; Mitchell’s fraternal twin sister Summer
(Sosie Bacon — not Susie, Sosie!) is being raised by her dad as a single parent — the Harrises have
divorced not only over the strain of having a missing kid but over Laura
inevitably and unconsciously neglecting the children she still has, Summer and
her younger brother Jonathan (Jacob Buster), in favor of her memories of
Mitchell.
Dad Greg Harris (Mark Valley) wants mom to sell the house — which
she, inevitably, has kept exactly the way it was when Mitchell disappeared,
including preserving his room as a sort of shrine to him — and both of them to
divorce and move on with their lives, especially since he has a new girlfriend,
Amanda (Carly Pope), and has impregnated her and naturally wants the two of them to be able to
marry and raise their upcoming daughter in a normal family environment. The
first intimation that the supposed “Mitchell Harris” isn’t who he’s claiming to
be comes when he insists on Greg bringing Jonathan along for the DNA test he’s
agreed to go through to establish that he is Mitchell. He grabs the blood
sample needle and extracts some of Jonathan’s blood while the two boys are
alone together, then has to quickly change his plans and stick a swab in
Jonathan’s mouth when he finds they’re going to run the test on saliva instead
of blood. Whoever he is, Mitchell also turns out to have a dark side, taking
Jonathan out into the woods and burning him, first with a candle and then with
what appears to be a lit cigarette. Mitchell is drawn as psychotic, though
unlike most Lifetime writers, who if anything overexplain their plots, Jennifer Maisel keeps his real
motives and mental state as powerfully ambiguous as his identity. Matthew
Fahey’s performance, vividly realized under Miele’s direction, avoids both the
usual stereotypes of how to play a psycho on screen — the snarling one
exemplified by Lawrence Tierney in late-1940’s and early-1950’s movies like Born
to Kill and The Hoodlum and the low-keyed boy-next-door variety pioneered
by Alfred Hitchcock’s direction of Anthony Perkins in Psycho. Instead Fahey conveys mental distress through
twitchy movements and breathy, barely in-control vocal intonations surprisingly
reminiscent of James Dean (indicating that Fahey might not be bad casting for a
Dean biopic even though the two don’t look all that much alike aside from both being young, slender
white men). He looks a lot more like the real-life crazy people I’ve known than
the usual depiction of mental illness we get in the movies!
It all comes to a
head at the lake where the real Mitchell Harris disappeared in the first place,
where he’s kidnapped Jonathan (he’s taken one of the Harris family cars, since
it’s already been established that he knows how to drive) and Laura has to go
in the water, even though she never learned to swim (though the thrashing about
she does in the lake is at least vaguely effective in getting her where she
needs to be), to rescue her real son from the psycho impostor. Afterwards,
instead of a big scene in which Mitchell either definitively dies or gets his
legal comeuppance, Laura agrees that the police can stop dragging the lake for
his corpse — and there’s a final tag scene in which Mitchell (or whoever he
is), dressed as he was at the beginning — scruffy jeans and a hoodie — is
hitchhiking along the side of a road, evidently planning to insinuate himself
into another family that has lost a son
and work his scheme again. What makes Lost Boy unusual for a Lifetime movie is the overall
ambiguity; we’re never told who “Mitchell” really is, what his motive for
impersonating the real Mitchell — in fact, it’s never definitively established
that he isn’t the real Mitchell, though
the presumption we’re supposed to come to after his elaborate monkeying around
with the DNA testing process is he isn’t and wants Jonathan’s blood and saliva
in the tests so it will come back saying they’re blood relatives is that he’s
faking it — and whereas another Lifetime writer, including Christine Conradt,
would probably have inserted an elaborate subplot establishing who “Mitchell”
really is and written in a subsidiary character masterminding the whole scheme
for some untoward purpose, Maisel leaves it all unstated, hinting in that final
scene that he’s pulled this before and will most likely pull it again for
motives that are only to be guessed at. Was “Mitchell” really kidnapped and
abused sexually? Is he looking for a family with whom he can connect? Is he
psychologically compelled to repeat the abuse scenarios to which he was
subjected? Or all of the above? We don’t know, and Miele and Maisel aren’t
about to tell us — which itself (along with the sheer power and realism of
Fahey’s performance) sets Lost Boy apart from most of the Lifetime fare and indicates that they’re both
worthy of bigger and better assignments.
