Review: Mean Creek

Mean Creek slots itself nicely in that catalog of macabre coming-of-age stories like River’s Edge and Stand by Me.

Mean Creek
Photo: Paramount Classics

The stink of death hovers over Jacob Aaron Estes’s Mean Creak, about a bunch of kids struggling with the moral consequences of a revenge plot that goes disastrously wrong. Said plot comes together after mild-mannered high schooler Sam (Rory Culkin) gets the shit kicked out of him by George (Josh Peck), a schoolyard bully and all-around asshole. So, Sam’s brother, Rocky (Trevor Morgan), and his rowdy friend, Marty (Scott Mechlowicz), arrange for a group boating excursion, inviting George along with the intention of humiliating him in the isolation of the wilds. That, of course, isn’t what happens, and when the traumatized group lands ashore again, the cocky and confident Marty finds his authority shaken.

Mean Creek slots itself nicely in that catalog of macabre coming-of-age stories like River’s Edge and Stand by Me by way of the existential panic of Deliverance. But while Estes strives for those movies’ moral complexities, his script feels more like an ad hoc grafting of psychodrama and coming-of-age story. The script manages a few compelling characters, but the rest falls into that nondescript Troubled Teenager category, even farcically so as in the case of the “sensitive boy” sulking in the company of his gay father and his boyfriend.

As Sam, Culkin does a creditable job, but he’s largely a passive character until the film’s final moments. The script might have attained a striking poignancy had it stayed inside his impressionable mind, processing the story’s events and culminating in the choice that he ultimately makes for himself. But by the time Sam does take his stand, Estes has diffused the script’s attentions so liberally that Sam’s actions, as weighty as they are, have little impact.

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But in George and Marty, Estes manages a pair of sharply drawn characters. In Mean Creak’s pivotal sequence, it’s Marty, a young man driven by his own private demons, who confronts the hulking George, clearly a budding and compulsive sociopath. Indeed, the film’s most truthful moment belongs to Marty, one in which the boy, wracked with tears and brandishing a gun, finds himself face to face with what is understood to be the rest of his life.

Mean Creak is also propped up by Estes’s flair for texture. Its close spaces—cars, small rooms, the boat—are vividly realized in the film’s intimate framings, in the crispness of its ordinary details and sounds, all of which serve to agitate the tensions eddying just below the surface. That all gives Mean Creek its raw, intriguing volatility, but that—and its genuinely talented cast—can do little to save a story muddled by a lack of clarity and a bluntness of purpose.

Score: 
 Cast: Rory Culkin, Ryan Kelley, Scott Mechlowicz, Trevor Morgan, Josh Peck, Carly Schroeder, Brandon Williams, J.W. Crawford  Director: Jacob Aaron Estes  Screenwriter: Jacob Aaron Estes  Distributor: Paramount Classics  Running Time: 89 min  Rating: R  Year: 2004  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Jay Antani

Jay Antani is a journalist, professional writer, editor, and fiction writer. He is the author of the books The Leaving of Things, Edge of Light, and Transcendent.

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