Review of Son of Rambow (2007) by Karyn S — 07 Dec 2010

Garth Jennings' smart and silly tribute to childhood imagination does for backyard filmmaking what "The Sandlot" did for neighbourhood baseball. But it's also a sneaky allegorizing of the collaborative creative process.

Will and Lee's friendship and cinematic partnership overcomes social and familial obstacles, is run through the gauntlet of peer recognition and cliquish poseurhood, and nearly runs aground on the ever-popular rocks of "creative differences". That it emerges intact should tell us more about the generic demands of even an indie comedy than of its particular tensile strength (Will's fertile visual imagination would seem to have more of a future in animation than in the nuts-and-bolts live-action filmmaking that the practical Lee is suited to). But what Jennings' film does is craft a perfectly air-tight space for the delirious creative energies of childhood to run rampant and use that space to comment on how those same energies are accessed, activated, and navigated to completion in a more dissipated form by adults (or should we call them older children?).

Oh, and the film is pretty funny and surprisingly tender without being maudlin. Not an easy balance to strike, either.