KING OF THE HILL (72)

Directed by: Steven Soderbergh (1993)

Starring: Jesse Bradford, Jeroen Krabbé, Lisa Eichhorn, Adrien Brody

The Pitch: A 12-year-old boy has to fend for himself in a seedy St. Louis motel during the Depression after being abandoned by both his parents.

Theo Sez: Second viewing unexpectedly justifies the lofty reputation of a film I'd always considered hugely over-rated (though I really thought I had the measure of it first time round, which just goes to show you), and it's even more fascinating in the light of Soderbergh's later career - something of a dry run for OUT OF SIGHT and (especially) TRAFFIC, doing for the first time what he later did in those films, viz. impose a sheen of 'sensibility' on generic material. The source may be autobiographical, but the template goes all the way back to "David Copperfield" - boy alone, sickly mother, problematic father, various eccentrics shoring up the fringes - and there are hackneyed elements like the sympathetic teacher who encourages his budding literary skills, or scenes like Aaron cringing in the limo as his rich friend's mother unknowingly points out his father in the street ("Look Billy, there's that salesman I told you about") ; Soderbergh, however, understates throughout, replaces the usual stirring music with a dreamy, hypnotic Cliff Martinez score and gives the hotel scenes a rich orange glow that's almost otherworldly, heightening the film into fantasy - playing it, in fact, as if it were one of Aaron's own tales of courage and derring-do. The theme of the outsider forging his / her destiny in an unyielding world recurs throughout his work (Terence Stamp in THE LIMEY, Julia Roberts in ERIN BROCKOVICH, James Spader in SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE), but none of the other films lives so completely in the hero's POV, seeing everything as he sees it (hence, e.g. the outrageously villainous cop) : it goes beyond 'inspirational' to existential, turning victim into hero - not in the sense of beating the odds (not 'heroic' per se), simply in the grim, determined sense of becoming the hero of his own life (note also how capitalism lets him down - all his money-making schemes come to naught - forcing him to survive just by toughing it out ; not a bad metaphor for the Depression itself). Cute in places - e.g. Aaron lying about his Dad, taking long sips of Coke to give himself thinking-time after each question - but it earns the cuteness ; the only catch is that it needs a strong central performance in order to work at all. Fortunately, it gets one of the most wondrous child performances of the past decade.