Review of The Kings of Summer (2013) by Norman B — 02 Oct 2013

The Kings of Summer is the story of a couple of high school friends, Joe and Patrick who feel misunderstood by their families and run away from home one summer to build a house in the woods and live by themselves. They're also joined by a third boy Biaggio, who isn't quite a friend but somehow enters their two-man circle in ways unclear. While their parents desperately look for them our woodland pioneers are faced with problems both mundane and profound whether it's how to hunt your food in a suburban forest that houses mostly rodents and snakes, or how to deal when the girl you like hooks up with your best friend.

Visually the film is lovely. Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts has a flair for seemingly offhand imagery a face fragmented in a glass door panel, a cathedral like wall of greenery in a forest clearing. And the stylized cutting often keeps us on edge, too. Early on, a hammer raised in slow-motion juxtaposed with a flashback to a smiling girl effectively hints at the violent, uncomfortable emotions held in check by the characters, and it does so better than any actual onscreen incident or dialogue exchange does.

The Kings of Summer never reconciles its two extremes of broad comedy and delicate drama. One fears that Vogt-Roberts and screenwriter Chris Galletta are using comedy as a way to avoid addressing why these kids feel so alienated from their families and their lives. It's easy to make Joe and Patrick seem out of step with the rest of their world if you make everyone else a caricature. Maybe the filmmakers want to mimic an adolescent mind set in which everyone else besides the subject is a freak or insane or cruel, but here it comes off as opportunistic at best and insensitive at worst.

It's not the cast, or the witty script, that truly makes The Kings of Summer work. This is a slice of pure life-affirming fun. The comedy really works, the drama lands hard and the third act emotional developments hit the heart like an arrow from cupid. The Kings of Summer delivers on absolutely every single level.