Ever since Jamie Bell's rousing debut as Billy Elliott, we've been waiting to see if he had the depth and stamina to carry another film. As the eponymous and troubled Hallam Foe, he proves he can - though it's unlikely this brave but flawed indie effort from writer/director David Mackenzie will catapult Bell to the bigtime.
As a study in the longer-term effects of the loss of a family member, Mackenzie's adaptation of Peter Jinks's novel risks far more by reaching deeper than similar recent treatments of the subject, for example Grace is Gone. To the extent that any of it actually succeeds owes far more to the performances than the script.
What lifts Hallam Foe is partly that it begins a couple of years after Hallam's mother has died, time enough for his dad to have remarried. So it's Hallam's having to process a succession of fundamental family structural changes that beckon us to some kind of understanding of his irrational behaviour and makes us root for his recovery.
It's the peopling of the film [and, probably of the novel which I haven't read] that lets the story down. In the opening scenes Hallam's sister, his only potential ally within the family, is sent away. We can never know whether or not they discussed Hallam's obsessive suspicions that their new step-mother Verity murdered their mother, nor whether they both resent her place in their father's affections.
What's clear is that Hallam's given acres of free reign to act out bizarre impulses to spy on people, to pop up unexpectedly wearing a head-dress fashioned from a dead badger with face-paint reminiscent of tribal and/or military ritual. Running below, like an unstoppable underground river, is the sexual blossoming of his adolescence that alights on the despised glamorous and languid step-mother.
Ciaran Hinds, an excellent actor, whose character might have sharpened the story's edges is woefully marginalized. So too many questions blow in the wind when Verity with despicable calculation seduces Hallam, then says to her husband that the boy made a pass at her.
Hallam tries to find solace and answers in Edinburgh, where he follows a woman in the street who reminds him of his dead mother. She's responsible for hiring staff in a posh hotel, and Hallam charms his way into a job and eventually into her bed and affections.
But her attraction to a boy, however charming, rings false since we never really get to understand why she's veering from a sexually intense relationship with a married man ... why she's choosing masochism and lack of commitment. Hallam may evoke her maternal side, but the attraction of a toy boy isn't usually a facet of a young successful attractive career woman.
The rest of the film traces Hallam's growing realization of the forces driving him - hormonal, rational and emotional. The plot itself is too contrived and most of the appeal of the characters - whether we like them or not - is largely down to the actors.
