Return to Innocence

Now here's a movie I actually have seen. Return to Innocence is a good film in that it bravely makes a procative but important point. It's disappointing though in that it then doesn't really try to answer its own rhetorical question. And what it does instead is at time toe-curlingly embarrassing.

The point, which is perhaps rather too obvious even before the story has really got started, is that it's the men who care about boys the most who are most likely to be unjustly fingered for child molestation - with all the grisly and unnecessary penalties that go with it. After all, you'll probably not be done if you're genuinely innocent - at least not in this country - but you'll almost certainly lose your job and your reputation, quite possibly your marriage as well, and you'll never work with kids again.

All perfectly true, and indeed a dilemma that makes for a good drama! Celeb paediatrician and not-gay married man and father of boys gets stung by his yummy thirteen-year-old boy-patient. Unfortunately what we're then treated to is a quite straightforward courtroom-drama runaround. In true Perry Mason-style the dénouement hinges on a piece of evidence that only comes to light right at the last moment. And in fact we never actually find out what really happened. (The boy had a man's love-juice in his drawers - but we're not told whose or how it go there.)

What adds insult though is that the filmmakers here aren't quite sure what the difference is between a film that is "edgy" and taboo-busting, and one that is just vaguely distasteful. The attempts to be "frank" and "honest" and "graphic" in some of the descriptions of what did go on this boy's bedroom(s) are so misguided that at times they border on the comical. In fact the editing at the points where the actors start discussing "masturbation" and "semen" and "fellatio", and so on, is so hamfisted that the audience is left in little doubt that no children were actually present when these parts of the drama were being filmed. (Think of cutting in the Little Britain sketches of the Tory MP confessing all in front of the Press and his family.)

In much the same way, there's one bit when the hero of the story is arrested at his home in the company of his buck-naked little boy, who's just been skinning dipping and who promptly drops his towel in front of the politceman. Is this even supposed to be funny? If not, then why not? What might have made it unintentionally funny is that the lad in question is quite clearly wearing a rather fetching pair of Fruit of the Looms. When one then reflects that the director seems to have been so paranoid about being fingered for kiddie-fiddling himself that he even left in an obvious goof to let his audience know that no children were enjoyed harmed during the making of this picture, then suddenly the film starts to seem a good deal less bold and groundbreaking.

The attempt to make the hero into a "liberal" paediatrician is morally defensible but dramatically misguided. How is any normal audience supposed to warm to this man if even I didn't? And we're not talking about some sort of lovable curmudgeon with a heart of gold played by Sir Ben Kingsley, simply because the acting in this film is nowhere near good enough to pull off that sort of thing. The boy in question is certainly attractive, but even he's not really believable. (OK, I don't actually know that many sexually abused adolescent boys. But how difficult can it be for a boy simply to play... a boy?) And the ending is overly soppy and sentimental.

Yes, the "good pedo" is a character with a lot of dramatic potential. And in fact there are a couple of wonderful films such as The Man without a Face and The Ogre (both made before this film and at about the same time as each other) that do feature pedos (in all but name) who are nevertheless sympathetic and even heroic. Return to Innocence, for all its slighlty mealy-mouthed little sideline defences of intergenerational "sexual relationships" and even "boylove" doesn't even go that far. (That's bl for "research" purposes, by the way - and apparently that works for scoping out kiddie porn as well, provided the local fuzz are playing ball.)

This is film that could have been braver - but also it could have been just plain better.