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Hugh Grant seems almost perfectly cast as the hero of "About a Boy," a sly audience-pleaser fashioned from the 1998 novel by Nick Hornby, whose "High Fidelity" was turned into an uneven but periodically brilliant film with John Cusack two years ago. Both books are about guys forced to confront their own immaturity, but ironically though the earlier picture was directed by an Englishman (Stephen Frears) and the present one by Paul and Chris Weitz (whose "American Pie" was quintessentially New World), it was "Fidelity" that transposed its story from London to the U.S., while the present flick remains resolutely British in setting and tone. Its themes are universal, though, and like "Billy Elliot" and "Bridget Jones's Diary" before it, "Boy" should find a large and appreciative audience on this side of the Atlantic.
Grant plays Will, an egregiously self-centered and superficial fellow living a life of indolence and conspicuous consumption off the royalties from a horrid Christmas ditty penned by his late father. In droll narration expertly stitched together from Hornby's book, Will describes his happily blasé existence, emphasizing particularly his habit of dumping women before anything like a serious relationship might develop. He finds break-ups with simply single girls, however, to be frequently unpleasant, and fortuitously stumbles upon the fact that single mothers, on the other hand, often end relationships themselves out of concern for their child's well-being (and, perhaps, a reluctance to make the same mistake twice).. Pretending to be a divorced dad with a fictitious two-year old son, therefore, Will joins an organization called S.P.A.T. (Single Parents, Alone Together) in hopes of meeting precisely the sort of women who are as shy of commitment as he is and with whom he can enjoy brief, painless encounters. The scheme backfires, however, when it leads to his meeting not only Fiona (Toni Collette), a troubled woman with a needy twelve-year old son named Marcus (Nicholas Hoult) who becomes attached to him, but also Rachel (Rachel Weisz), another single mom whom he really falls for, and who assumes that Marcus is actually Will's son. Before long Will and Marcus have come to depend on each other in a whole variety of ways, and Will is drawn into ever-deeper connections with people he'd initially intended to use and dispose of.
The Weitzes might seem like odd choices to turn this story into a film, not only because of the locale but also because it concerns characters who are older and presumably wiser than the high schoolers of "Pie." On reflection, though, their involvement is entirely appropriate. Will is, in his own way, as emotionally adolescent as the kids in their earlier picture; he may be in his late thirties by the calendar, but his attitudes are as infantile and clueless as theirs, and his story is equally (though far less grossly) one of growing up. (The fact that Chris attended Cambridge University, moreover, helps to explain how the brothers captured the British atmosphere so well.) And since the screenplay by Peter Hedges and the Weitzes, heavy on the first-person narrative though it might be, very nicely succeeds in transferring the tone and undercurrents of the book to the screen, the result is an excellent adaptation of the source--sharply humorous, taking a periodically unexpected narrative tack, and not nearly as squishily sentimental as it might easily have become.
There are, unfortunately, a few drawbacks. Collette, fine actress though she is, is perhaps too real as the troubled, suicide-prone Fiona. It's commendable that she doesn't soften the character into a comic convention, but in her zeal to resist that inclination she makes the unhappy mom an almost frightening figure. Similarly, one's thankful that Hoult isn't your standard-issue, cute-as-a-button kid, but he portrays Marcus as so inhibited and introverted that he's slightly creepy. The big bonding sequence at the close that encapsulates Will's paternal concern for the lad, moreover--while it embodies the pop music sensibility so characteristic of Hornby--inevitably comes across as an all-too-obvious device to elicit audience sympathy and laughs. Even in that scene, however, Grant's charm effortlessly wins us over. The role of Will plays to all the actor's strengths, and he takes advantage of every opportunity. It's a smart performance--knowing but not smug, easily catching both the surface attractiveness and the underlying pathos of the character without overdoing either. Technically the picture is beautifully made, too.
In sum "About a Boy" is a rarity--essentially a formula picture, but one that exhibits sufficiently eccentric touches to make it, some missteps aside, a pleasure to watch.
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