Review: Loverboy

Working with Atom Egoyan has not done Kevin Bacon any favors. The bull’s-eye around the actor’s asshole was the “truth” about Egoyan’s last film. In Loverboy, the actor’s directorial debut, the truth about Kyra Sedgwick’s character apparently has something to do with her father’s hacking cough. Emily Stoll (Sedgwick) is certifiable, an ass-woman who stealthily targets men for anonymous sex; her hope is to get pregnant—failing numerous times (most dramatically during a miscarriage at an airport terminal), she kicks one over the goal line with the help of a businessman played by Campbell Scott. With Daddy out of the way, Emily raises and smothers little Paul (Dominic Scott Kay) within an inch of his life; he doesn’t go to school because his batty, cocooning mother wants him to stay at home and dig for magic treasure. Is there a rationale to Emily’s eccentricity and cut-the-cord anxiety? Noxious as it may have been, Where the Truth Lies at least acknowledged it was uprooting a mystery. Loverboy, on the other hand, sets its audience adrift in a fog of creepazoid uncertainty. The monotone narration, which suggests a yeast infection commercial or something they’d pump through the stereophonics of one of Gattaca’s mind-control buildings, doesn’t clear anything up. Neither does the past. Played by Bacon and Marisa Tomei in a series of ’70s-era interjections shot at 45-degree angles (it’s Bacon’s jejune way of differentiating the past from the present), Emily’s mother and father suggest the crazies are genetic. But because Emily is already acting mentally impaired (literally) behind her parents’ back, what’s the use of the film’s ending, a juxtaposition of two sweet-hereafter scenarios? I don’t know what’s worse, the what-the-fuck of Where the Truth Lies or the so-what of Loverboy. Either way, here’s hoping Bacon’s next film doesn’t miscarry.