MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: It’s in the nature of coming of age movies to place the need for progression within the wider world and/or emotional development upon their teenage protagonists; they demand acceptance as the price of admission to adulthood. One of the worthy traits of Terri, a low key American independent drama directed by Azazel Jacobs, is that it doesn’t push the movie’s oversized protagonist – first-time actor Jacob Wysocki as the titular lead – towards a turning point. The picture is less about the getting of wisdom than the simple realisation that finishing high school, or having a crush, won’t automatically change how life treats you.
The film moves to the rhythms of Terri, who lives with his shuffling, medicated uncle, James (Creed Bratton), in woodlands on the edge of a nondescript town, and attends – with some frustration and tardiness – a high school where he’s more mocked than victimised. Dressed in pajamas – 'they’re comfortable," he reasons – Terri is content to merge with the background, which is something of a difficulty when you’re as large and observant as he is. The self-aware loner with the gentle voice, who watches nature documentaries and reads Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as a way of understanding his situation, appears happy to drift off into content reclusion.
Jacobs, a productive voice in the American underground/Sundance scene, keeps a calm distance from Terri, letting the character explain himself through his actions while emphasising the cluttered, nurturing environment he lives amidst. But Patrick DeWitt’s screenplay pushes him towards others, most prominently John C. Reilly as Mr. Fitzgerald, the deputy principal who declares that he’s most focused on the good-hearted kids and the troublemakers; he hangs out with the former and harangues the latter.
Reilly has been focused on increasingly broad comedies over the last few years, falling into Will Ferrell’s orbit, but the character actor from Paul Thomas Anderson’s first three films returns here, with a mixture of bravado and sometimes misguided guile behind an adult trying to straighten the course of children. Reilly captures the strange crinkling behind Mr. Fitzgerald’s front, a bone-deep tiredness that makes his exuberance worrying more than exciting.
There’s no Good Will Hunting breakthrough – hugs, tears and repeated exhortations that 'it’s not your fault" – between Terri and the educator, and the film lets you wonder if Mr. Fitzgerald, who has his own moments of domestic upheaval, is actually presenting himself as a warning and not an example. But his presence does prod Terri towards engagement, saving the socially excommunicated Heather (Olivia Crocicchia) from expulsion and making the acquaintance of Chad (Bridger Zadina), a regular visitor to Mr. Fitzgerald who falls into the troublemaker category.
The trio’s evening together at Terri’s house, after Uncle James has lapsed into a narcotised slumber, is the film’s culmination, yet it’s not the redemptive nod to John Hughes’ comic '80s melodramas that it could have so easily been. The bad behaviour, fueled by purloined whiskey and anti-depressants, and subsequent yearning reveals to Terri more about his unexpected cohorts than he in turn shows to them. He doesn’t intrinsically change, but he understands that there’s nothing wrong in being who he is. That’s a small outlook for the cinema, which can so often seek the expansive, but in this case it makes for a solidly played story.
