Psycho's Movie Reviews #287: The Good Son (1993)

The Good Son is a 1993 American psychological thriller film directed by Joseph Ruben and distributed by 20th Century Fox. It was written by English novelist Ian McEwan. Its story follows a young boy named Mark who, after the death of his mother, is sent to stay with his aunt and uncle while his father is away on business. While there he meets his cousin Henry, who shows signs of violent and evil behaviour. It stars Macaulay Culkin, Elijah Wood, Wendy Crewson, David Morse, Daniel Hugh Kelly, and Jacqueline Brookes.

The film was produced by Joseph Ruben and Mary Ann Page and was released on September 24, 1993. It grossed $12.5 million during its opening weekend and $60.6 million worldwide, against a budget of $17 million. It received negative reviews from critics and has a 26% approval rating based on 27 votes on Rotten Tomatoes.

Plot

As a 12-year-old living in Arizona, Mark Evans has recently experienced the death of his mother, Janice. Before leaving on a business trip to Tokyo, Mark's father Jack delivers him to his Uncle Wallace and Aunt Susan's house in Maine, where he will stay during winter break. Mark is reintroduced after 10 years to his extended family, including his cousins Connie and Henry. Mark and Henry get along at first and Henry seems to be nice and well-mannered. However, Henry displays an abnormal fascination with death, making Mark feel uneasy.

Henry begins to display psychopathic behaviour, which Mark is unable to tell Wallace and Susan about due to Henry's threats. One of his violent actions is throwing a dummy off a bridge onto the highway, causing a massive vehicle pileup. He then plans to kill Connie. Afraid something might happen to her, Mark spends the night in her room. The next morning, Mark awakens to find Henry has taken Connie ice skating. At the pond, Henry purposely throws her toward thin ice, which collapses. Connie is rescued, but ends up in a coma. Despite not believing Mark initially, Susan becomes suspicious and is able to interrupt when Henry visits Connie's room, planning to suffocate her. Susan then finds a rubber duck Henry has hidden in his shed. It had once belonged to Henry's younger brother Richard and had been with him in the bathtub the night he drowned; the duck went missing after. When Susan confronts Henry, he coldly reminds her that the toy had belonged to him before it had been Richard's. He then flips and kindly asks for the rubber duck back. After a violent tug-of-war, he takes the toy and throws it down the well.

As Susan and Mark grow closer, Henry insinuates he will kill Susan rather than let Mark continue to develop a relationship with her. When a fight breaks out between the two boys, Wallace locks Mark in the den. Henry asks a suspicious Susan to go for a walk with him, while Mark escapes and chases after them. Susan confronts Henry, asking him if he killed Richard, to which Henry sarcastically replies, "What if I did?" Realizing that Mark was right about her son's true nature, Susan tells Henry that he needs help, but he refuses and flees. Susan gives chase and upon arriving at a cliff, Henry shoves her over the edge. As Susan dangles, Henry picks up a large rock he intends to drop on Susan, but Mark tackles him. Susan manages to pull herself up just in time to grab hold of the boys as they roll over the edge, one in each hand. Henry holds on with both hands but Mark's one-handed grip begins to slip. With only enough strength to save one of them, Susan reluctantly releases Henry and he falls to his death. Susan pulls Mark up and they look down as Henry's corpse is washed away into the ocean.

When Mark returns home to Arizona, he reflects upon Susan's choice to save him instead of Henry. He wonders if she would make the same choice again but knows it is something he will never ask her.

Production

Following the completion of his novel The Child in Time, English novelist Ian McEwan was invited by 20th Century Fox to write a screenplay "about evil – possibly concerning children." McEwan recalled, "The idea was to make a low budget, high class movie, not something that Fox would naturally make a lot of money on." Despite being well received, the end result was deemed insufficiently commercial by the parties that commissioned it and it floated around Hollywood until being discovered by independent producer Mary Ann Page. Enthusiastic about the script, originally sent to her as a writing sample, Page tried to get the project off the ground for three and a half years. The film was briefly set up at Universal Studios, during which Brian Gilbert was attached as director. In 1988, Michael Klesic was originally cast in the role of Henry Evans. The film was soon after put on hold due to a lack of funding.

Following the successes of Home Alone and The Silence of the Lambs, which respectively demonstrated the appeal of both a movie about kids and of an "extreme thriller," Fox itself chose to revisit the project, which they now saw as viable. Director Michael Lehmann (Heathers) became attached, Laurence Mark was appointed as a co-producer and McEwan was called in for rewrites. Mary Steenburgen was cast as Susan and Jesse Bradford had replaced Klesic as Henry because he had grown too old to play the part. McEwan was optimistic about the project and by November 1991, sets were being built in Maine for a production that would cost approximately $12 million. This progress was suddenly interrupted when Kit Culkin, Macaulay Culkin's father and manager, at the time a notoriously influential force in Hollywood due to the child's stardom, wanted his son to star in the film. Wishing to prove Macaulay's capacity in a dark role, he made his son's part in The Good Son a condition for his appearing in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Fox agreed enthusiastically due to Culkin's bankability.

As the movie was originally scheduled to shoot at the same time as Home Alone 2, the start date for The Good Son was pushed back for a year, making Steenburgen no longer available and having her replaced by Wendy Crewson but also enabling Elijah Wood's involvement. Director Lehmann and producer Mark conflicted with the imposition, leading both to leave the project. The demanding Culkin would go on to insist that Macaulay's sister, Quinn, receive a role in the film and vetted replacement director Joseph Ruben (Sleeping with the Enemy). Furthermore, the budget had risen to an estimated $20 million. McEwan found himself performing further rewrites that continued to simplify the story to satisfy Ruben's comparatively mainstream tastes and was ultimately unceremoniously removed from the project altogether when another screenwriter was commissioned, Ruben's frequent collaborator David Loughery. Despite this, McEwan was awarded sole writing credit in arbitration when he contested a shared credit.

Release/Reception/Box Office

The Good Son was theatrically released on September 24, 1993. It was released on VHS and Laserdisc in 1994. A DVD of the film was released on September 11, 2012. A Blu-ray release of The Good Son was announced on October 25, 2016 and was released on August 1, 2017.

Elmer Bernstein's score to The Good Son was released in 1993 by Fox Music. The score was orchestrated by Emilie A. Bernstein and Patrick Russ, and featured Cynthia Millar on ondes martenot.

A tie-in novel was published alongside the movie's release in 1993, written by Todd Strasser. The novel elaborates on the movie, detailing how Henry was born a sociopath, rather than being some personification of evil. In the novel, Henry's mother Susan eventually discovers that Henry is unable to understand emotions like love and sorrow, and that pleasure derived from selfish actions and the torment of others are the few things he truly feels. The book also concludes differently from the movie, ending with Mark returning to Uncle Wallace's home in Maine one year later. Mark and Susan visit Henry's grave, which includes an epitaph: "Without Darkness There Can Be No Light".

As of October 2020, on Rotten Tomatoes, the film had an approval rating of 26% based on 27 reviews, with an average rating of 4.27/10. The site's consensus stated: "The Good Son is never good enough to live up to its unsettling potential, failing to drum up much suspense and unable to make Macaulay Culkin a credible psychopath." As of December 2020, on Metacritic, the film had a weighted average score of 45 out of 100 based on 17 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.

Roger Ebert, who deemed the film inappropriate for children, awarded it half a star, calling the project a "creepy, unpleasant experience". He and Gene Siskel later gave it "Two Thumbs Down". Many critics criticized the casting of Culkin because of his comedic image from Home Alone. Hal Hinson of The Washington Post stated that "the mere presence of the adorable boy star...seems to throw the whole film out of whack, making the picture play more like an inadvertent comedy than a thriller." Janet Maslin in The New York Times wrote that the end sequence at the cliff "is one of its few suspenseful and original moments" and "is quite literally gripping."

Paul Willinstein of The Morning Call described the film as "'Home Alone' meets 'Misery' meets 'The Hand That Rocks The Cradle.'"

The Good Son earned US$44,789,789 at the North American box office revenues, and another $15,823,219 in other territories, for a total worldwide box office take of $60,613,008.

Budget $17 million

Box office $60.6 million

My Review

The plot, directed by Joseph Ruben, who two years earlier was responsible for Sleeping with the Enemy, follows the drama of Mark Evans, played by the then-almost unknown Elijah Wood {a very, very, very young Elijah Wood}, who, after his mother's death, moves in with his uncles and cousins. Culkin plays Mark's sadistic and evil cousin Henry. As time passes, Mark not only suspects Henry's evil, he himself becomes his cousin's victim and witness. The plot then continues without offering any major surprises until the already predictable ending.

Each character in the film seems to live under multiple tensions, from the resistance to leaving the phase of denial of grief, to the distortion they make of reality. The film begins with the death of Mark's mother and the influence that her last words had on her son's construction of grief. The mother said that she would always be with him, which could be a metaphor for the love that unites them, however, due to the stressful moments that followed his death, Mark believed the words literally, so he made a projection of his mother to Henry's mother, with whom he moved temporarily as a result of his father's work.

Henry's family lives in the shadow of an accident that killed one of their children (drowned in the bathtub), leaving the mother with a permanent sense of guilt and pain. Apparently, the other children of the couple (a girl about 8 years old and Henry) have a normal routine. But the problem is just that: almost everything looks normal on the surface, but there is a strange shadow of horror as you look at the actions that make up Henry's daily life. Mark's first experience of Henry's darker face nearly cost him his life. In an attempt to climb the tree house, he is at the mercy of her help, as without it he would very likely fall from a huge height and, by Henry's reaction, he began to become aware of his strange sense of humour. Because they spent a lot of time together, Henry showed Mark so much of his personality, those nuances his parents didn't see because they couldn't bear the brunt of understanding what lay beneath the surface, or because they didn't pay enough attention to detail.

Mark quickly realized that Henry couldn't bear to be upset, that the smallest things could bring out a strong irritation. The barking dog was one of his targets. By showing a weapon he invented to his cousin and then using it with the excuse of scaring the dog, Henry actually aimed it directly at the animal and killed it. This fact provoked fear and horror in Mark. A horror based on the absence of elements that would make him understand his cousin's actions. He couldn't quite grasp the reasons why Henry placed so little value on life or the consequences of his actions.

The approach to childhood psychopathy given in this paper is interesting. The movie character (Henry), despite being a child, had many characteristics typical of psychopaths. He pretended to be naïve and dear, used his intelligence and insight to make others believe in the truths he created. He did evil for no apparent reason, caused pain without any trace of remorse (such as the details he recounted about his brother's drowning and for the actions he took that nearly resulted in his sister's death). And he had impulsive behaviour, often governed only by the need to get out of boredom. For example, Henry convinced his cousin to help him carry a puppet onto a bridge, but hid him that his real intention was to cause an accident on the road. He did it just for fun. And the sequence of that scene has one of the most disturbing dialogues in the film: "When you realize you can do anything, you're free. You can fly. Nobody can touch you. Nobody. Don't be afraid to fly."

At this point, Mark had no doubts about Henry's malice. An evil that he did not understand, but that was latent, despite being far from the perception of the boy's parents. The stress of having to protect his cousin, the projection of his mother (represented by Henry's mother) and himself triggered a disorder in his behaviour, which made his word not mean much, especially with someone like Henry to smoothly manipulate the facts. And Henry, taking advantage of his affective-emotional insensitivity, managed to keep the pieces on the board always in favour of his next move.

{I can't help but laugh... Every time Culkin falls my mind goes straight to Catherin O'Hara screaming "KEVIN!!!" 😂😂😂}

In the context of the film, evidence of Henry's antisocial personality is only witnessed by Mark, as he is a controllable variable, that is, the cousin can manipulate and create an environment that denies any "truth" he might try to assert about its nature. The logic of Henry's mind creates a reality based on the total absence of moral and ethical sense, which is why it is so complex to try to understand the variables that outline and underpin his personality.

The idea that a child might have psychopathic tendencies remains controversial among psychologists. Some say that psychopathy, like other personality disorders, is almost impossible to accurately diagnose in children, or even teenagers. Others fear that, even if such a diagnosis could be made accurately, the social cost of branding a child as a psychopath is too high, as this disorder has historically been presented as something that cannot be effectively treated. On the other hand, there are studies showing that signs of psychopathy can be detected in children as young as 3 years old. A small but growing number of psychologists "say that tackling the problem early can present an opportunity to help these children change course." In the film, Henry's mother doesn't have time to understand all the nuances of this pathology, the only thing she understands is that her son is sick. The two children (Henry and Mark) are deeply marked by the choice she must make in the end. And, in the film, as in many everyday situations, there is often no choice that is free from profound suffering.

The Evil Angel isn't a very well-produced or inspired film, but its only unquestionable point is Culkin's performance. We can complain and fault everything but what the eternal Kevin from Home Alone does on the scene. The sly expressions, the cold and scary look and the outbursts of fury show how good an actor the boy was. Henry works with lies to maintain control. After scaring his cousin and revealing that he killed his own brother, Henry begins trying to make his parents angry and worried about Mark's presence. The scene in which the mother discovers her deceased child's toy is frightening. The way in which Henry heightens his aggression is amazing. It is also important to highlight the excellent performance of another child star Elijah Wood, completely believable in the scene and that makes us root and become fond of the boy who just lost his mother and who is labelled a liar in practically the entire film.

However, even with this success in the construction of the protagonist, the script slips ugly in trying to convince us that no one suspects the evil intentions of the character? I've seen many irresponsible parents in the movies, but here there are situations that go beyond the limit. They let their son take his sister ice-skating without them being together. What kinds of parents are these that allow their children to be so loose in the world or do not follow the children's "secrets"? The Evil Angel is a good portrait to reflect on the character and nature of people. Henry was born with "defect". He had a home, love and support, but he was still on his way to becoming a dangerous man. His only way out would be prison or some psychological institute. If a person with a family and economic structure suffered from this, imagine what should not happen to someone who grows up far from their family, living on the streets and facing violence in order to survive.... Is there salvation for those who are born bad? In the case of the movie, the answer is not very optimistic. For the villain, in this case.

If it were a little longer, it could get even denser and darker, as well as exploring much better facets of Henry's psychopathy and the relationship between all the characters in his core family. The impression is that the conclusion was a little rushed, even if shocking. Overall, director Joseph Reuben (Sleeping with the Enemy) manages to create the necessary tension for the plot and the ending, controversial to nowadays. Even with other more recent titles, such as Orphan (2009), The Good Son remains a good example of the genre. Sin against only short duration. It's a film that gaining touches and with more time to develop the story, could yield a beautiful remake currently in the hands of a good director. 8.1/10