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.
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.
Image/Sound
Mean Creek is one of the best-looking films of 2004 and it shows on this Paramount Home Entertainment DVD. From beginning to end, you’d be hard pressed to find a single flaw: skin tones are accurate and the sinister blues and greens of the film’s color palette are accurately evoked throughout. The soundtrack, while not as impressive, is nonetheless atmospheric, with clear dialogue and the occasionally powerful surround.
Extras
As powerful a glimpse director Jacob Aaron Estes gives us into the lives of a group of young people on the brink of adulthood, neither the director nor his cast are prepared to discuss the dangerous psychological terrain of the film on the commentary track included on this DVD edition of Mean Creek. Joining Estes on the track is his editor Madeleine Gavin and cinematographer Sharon Meir, as well actors Trevor Morgan, Ryan Kelly, Carly Schroeder, and Josh Peck. During the film’s grueling boating sequence, in which the behavior of Lucas’s bully challenges the humanity of the film’s characters, the cast and crew aren’t concerned with exploring how the scene mirrors behavior in the real world, instead aiming for something more superficial: if the “strong hateful language” that came out of Lucas’s mouth “got” to the film’s actors. In short, this isn’t a very deep track. Rounding out the disc is a phenomenal series of storyboards and trailers for other Paramount Home Entertainment products on the way.
Overall
In Mean Creek, you can cut the tension with a knife, and while this DVD edition does justice to the film’s sinister color scheme, the cast and crew commentary leaves much to be desired.
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