The English film Boy A, one of the strongest dramatic features in this year's Tribeca Film Festival, is a sympathetic character study of a person that most of society would vote to flush: a twenty-four-year-old man (Andrew Garfield) who's just been released from prison after serving a fourteen-year sentence for a murder committed when he was ten years old. The movie, which is based on a novel by Jonathan Trigell, was directed by John Crowley from a script by Mark O'Rowe. They previously worked together on the Intermission, an invigorating jumble of a movie with a slew of characters colliding with each others as their storylines criss-crossed. Boy A has a smaller cast and a much tighter focus: everything comes down to the character who, during his trial, was turned by the tabloids into a monster known by the protective alias "Boy A." Preparing him for release into the world, his gently paternal counselor (Peter Mullen) christens him "Jack" and advises him to immediately start applying for as many jobs as he can, because "the more forms you fill out, the more real your name's going to become to you." The counselor tries his best to give "Jack" the right balance of tender concern and tough-minded direction, but there isn't much he can do about his charge's real problem. Having missed out on fourteen key years of social interaction, Jack is like a Martian trying to learn how to pass for human, and desperate to not give himself away in the process. (When a nice, approachable girl from his new workplace flirts with him, he doesn't know what to say except, "I love you.") In some important ways, he's still ten years old. When the counselor drives him to his new lodgings, he sticks his face out the window, checking out the sights and possibilities open to a free adult, and his face lights up in response to seeing a familiar yellow-and-red logo. "McDonald's!" he says in an awestruck voice.
Andrew Garfield gives a blessedly open and unguarded performance. He gives Jack a shy dignity; other people are impressed with Jack, because they mistake the concentration with which he's struggling to avoid putting a foot wrong as evidence that he has deeper things on his mind. The script errs a bit in giving the audience too many reasons to share in that admiration; it skirts the usual trap of making the potentially unsympathetic character a touch superhuman, as if it would be all right to lynch him if he were just average. And a subplot involving the counselor's son is rigged and hokey. But Crowley's sure touch with Garfield and the other actors, including Mullen and Katie Lyons as the girl from work) takes the curse off much of this. Garfield's performance alone does more to illuminate that there are aspects to the problem of "kids who kill" than is dreamt of in Dr. Phil's philosophy. The adult Jack doesn't experience self-pity or see himself as a marytr; he simply wants the chance to live some kind of life in which he's not defined by something that happened when he was, for all intents and purposes, a different, less fully formed being than he is now.