‘Tis the Night…
The Night of the graves’ delight…
Nicholas Verso’s 2016 Boys in the Trees (available on Netflix) is a beautiful film and a really unique addition to your Halloween viewing. It captures the essence of the season and uses it in an entirely new way to tell its story. Rather than a full-on frightfest or creature feature, it harnesses that energy and uses it to tell a bittersweet coming of age tale about how friendships can bend, break, and be reforged in the throes of adolescence.
Set in an Australian suburb in the late 1990s, the film opens on the afternoon of Halloween. In Australia, this means that school is just getting out for the summer, and after exams have passed, our protagonist, Corey (Toby Wallace), will be entering into adulthood with no real idea of what he wants to do with himself. He has dreams of going to New York to study photography. His father wants him to stay close and study something more practical, and his gang of trouble-making, miscreant friends want him to join them in simply continue living as if their teen years will last forever.
As Corey and his friends hang out at the local skate park, their leader, Jango (Justin Holborow) spies classmate, Jonah (Gulliver McGrath) among the small crowd. Jonah is a solitary boy. Small and quiet, he makes an easy target for Jango and his pack, and they do not hesitate to pounce. Jango approaches Jonah and orders him out of the park, pushing him down onto the concrete. Corey snaps a photo of Jonah in that moment, as the bullied boy looks up with shame and defeat in his eyes. Corey has little interest in Jango’s cruel torments, but he wants more than anything to run with the crowd. So he says nothing, offers no aid to Jonah, and follows the group out of the park and on to their evening of Halloween pranks.
As Corey tires of his friends’ antics, he wanders back to the skate park where he once again encounters Jonah. The smaller boy has fallen off of his board and cracked his head on the concrete. Corey rushes to his side, and though Jonah appears okay, he convinces Corey to walk him home.
“You owe me, old pal.” he says, as the two walk off together. You see, Jonah and Corey are not vaguely familiar faces that pass each other in the hallway. The two have a history. A childhood friendship that spanned all of reality and into the world of make-believe. As the two walk, they begin to once again embrace that world. The remember songs they once sang, stories they held dear, and a game of imagination that they would inhabit as children, but has long since been forgotten as adulthood has crept ever closer.
Over the course of Halloween night, as the pair wanders around town, reminiscing, reconnecting and trying to overcome the gap that has come between them over the years, Verso uses his story to illustrate the ways in which the simple act of growing up can pull us apart. We all have people who were our best friends in childhood, but whose names we can barely remember now. Life takes us in different directions, but what this film points out, is that it happens earlier than we ever expect it will. Childhood fantasies and bonds become nothing more than distant memories in the blink of an eye, and the worlds that we create together become simply fairytales.
Halloween is a magical night. It is an evening that carries its own sense of mystery and wonder and a magic that cannot be found on any other day of the year. This film harnesses that magic and uses it to tap into childhood fantasies. So even though the film isn’t scary, it does have that air about it. That mysterious nature that the walls between the world of reality and everything beyond have been thinned for just a few hours. On that night, our dreams, fantasies and memories are all more readily accessible, along with our fears. Boys in the Trees is a film that reminds us of that magic and uses it to tell a bittersweet tale of friendship and growing up.
