The Mudge Boy

Review By: Aaron Cutler
AaronCutler@TheCinemaSource.com

The first time that we see Duncan Mudge he is sucking a chicken’s head. It is his favorite chicken, we soon learn, named Chicken, and putting its head in his mouth will calm it; we sense that doing so calms Duncan, too. Then Duncan’s father walks into the barn and frowns on his son disapprovingly. Duncan’s mother has died recently, and now it is dinnertime.

The Mudge Boy, writer-director Michael Burke’s first feature (he based it off of a Sundance award-winning short called Fishbelly White) tells the story of Duncan (Emile Hirsch), a sad, strange fourteen year-old in a rural town who, as his father (Richard Jenkins) puts it, “can’t even get into trouble like a normal boy.” Over the course of the summer following his mother’s death Duncan will fall under the influence of a group of older “popular” kids, one of whom is Perry (Tom Guiry), the local lothario who delights in telling Duncan conquest yarns. Duncan is a virgin – he seems too small and shy to have even thought about sex, let alone expressed an interest – but we get the sense that he will soon wise up.

Without revealing too much more, let us also say that the phallic imagery associated with chicken-sucking is entirely intentional, and that Duncan’s donning of his mother’s dress in front of Perry will lead to bigger and bolder things.

The tone of a film like The Mudge Boy can be difficult to maintain; we know where the movie is heading from the first moment that we see Duncan playing with his nipples, but the story must nevertheless try to stay away from too much obviousness or unintentional snickers. The movie partly succeeds, and part of the solution has to do with the character of Duncan, a quiet, effeminate boy that seems much too gentle to inhabit this rough world. His father will not even let Duncan work in the fields alongside him, opting to use a hired hand instead, and within the character Hirsch generates a kind of cautiousness and curiosity that makes him interesting to watch. Burke’s script doesn’t let us as deep into Duncan as it could have, though, leaving us with generic sadness instead of specific torment.

The real key to the movie, lies not in Duncan but in his father, for his presence is the one that gives the story its gravity and stakes. The notion of a hard-ass father disapproving of his weak boy could easily be given over to caricature, but neither Burke nor Jenkins (who has had a history of playing colder patriarchs in films like North Country and the HBO program Six Feet Under) give in to that temptation, opting instead to add layers of tenderness, uncertainty and deep shame. His narrative, in fact, proves more powerful than Duncan’s, as we sense that what he ultimately desires is not to get rid of Duncan ...