ABOUT A BOY (2002)  ***

Reviewed 5/18/02

Right from the start, ABOUT A BOY is clearly Nick Hornby material.  The smug first-person narration, the male perspective on the dating scene, and the protagonist’s gigantic music collection, all presented in the opening minutes, are Hornby obsessions.  The movie, thankfully, also captures Hornby’s humor, a unique blend of ironic detachment and self-flagellating observation.

Based on Hornby’s book of the same name and like his previous novel-turned-movie, HIGH FIDELITY, ABOUT A BOY follows another cynical man-boy, Will Freeman (Hugh Grant) who wallows in his shallowness.   Some deeply suppressed region of himself worries over his lack of substance and his fixation on trivialities, but he can always laugh it off with a nervous joke.  A well-off bachelor, Will does nothing for a living because he lives off of residuals from his father’s lone musical hit, an annoying Christmas jingle.  All day long, he watches television, pampers his looks, plays billiards, and most especially, pursues women.  He is not looking for marriage, and so continually finds himself breaking up with the women, which he finds a loathsome experience.  After one particularly short-term relationship, Will discovers single-mothers are more apt to break up with him, thus saving him from the guilt.  He decides to seek more out.

Will’s friends admonish him for his selfish, insubstantial lifestyle, but he is happy being an island unto himself with no responsibilities.  Will is clearly self-aware, he just cannot, and tells himself he should not, change his behavior.  That is until 12-year old Marcus (Nicholas Hoult) enters his life.  Saddled with a bowl cut and Mr. Spock eyebrows, Marcus is raised alone by manically-depressed hippie vegan mom, Fiona (Toni Collette).  Marcus faces relentless bullying at school for his lack of fashion sense and his inability to stop himself from bursting into song.  When Fiona fails at a suicide attempt, Marcus decides he cannot watch over her by himself.  Having met Will through one of his mother’s friends, Marcus opts to recruit Will for the task of becoming his mother’s boyfriend.

Brothers Chris and Paul Weitz, who are responsible for AMERICAN PIE, provide deft direction, enhancing character and story with little visual details.  Little Nicholas Hoult is very impressive as the precocious but awkward Marcus, and Hugh Grant delivers perhaps his best performance  No longer the uncomfortable stutterer of his early career, Grant makes Will’s confident brio as well as his soft heart believable.  As one of the women Will chases, Rachel Weisz does not get to do a lot, but she makes the most of her limited screen time and looks stunning to boot.

With great relief, ABOUT A BOY does not quite go in the direction the setup suggests.  Still, the last quarter takes a maudlin turn from which the film never really recovers.   The use of voice-over from both Will and Marcus helps tremendously as the movie unearths much humor through their contrasting perspectives on the same events.  Ultimately, the theme about a man who has to grow up gets a too literal and pat treatment here, but ABOUT A BOY makes up for it by being wittily and charmingly funny.