Hallam Foe (2007)

the audience applauded

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Yesterday I forced my self to see this movie to the end.Normally I would have stopped after 10 minutes.A lot of impressions from the beginning of this movie already suggest that this movie has no quality.A boy who seems to have enormous skills,the tree house decoration it all seems very unlikely.I just don't swallow it.Not to speak from the leader,which probably has to give some happy trendy atmosphere.Very bad. Also morally it is a completely wrong movie.It suggests that it is okay when you have a trauma that you can act it out and do what ever you want,even try to kill someone,and then come out of it reborn with glory, as if this should not be punished.

Maybe I just wasn't intelligent enough to get this movie, but to me, Mister Foe was just weird and twisted. Jamie Bell (who I'll always associate with Billy Elliott) was phenomenal as Hallam Foe, a seventeen year old voyeur, whose mother had recently committed suicide. Unable to cope, Hallam leaves for the big city, where he finds a woman who looks eerily similar to his mother and Hallam starts spying on her. I get that this film was supposed to be coming of age, sophisticated, and meaningful, but honestly, I just found it creepy. The film was choppy, extremely slow, and just when you thought something was going to happen, it doesn't. In Mister Foe, Jamie Bell really does show just how good an actor he has become. Aside from that, this movie is just weird.

Hallam Foe is a number of things with each of these things adding something to as well as manipulating the narrative and course of events that unfold. The film is a psycho-thriller; a coming of age story and a journey of self discovery before ever so slightly evolving into a circular journey. This is best reviewed by an event right nearer the end when the father of the film's title gives away a revelation that would've had a huge change on the film's events prior to this moment. But the film withholds it until the protagonist has been through what he needs to go through in order for the film to be the number of things that it is.The father is Julius (Hinds) and his son and character from which the title heralds is Hallam Foe, played with the right amount of naivety and confidence by Jaime Bell, one of Britain's more promising recent talents that has made it big in America thanks to such films like King Kong and the recent Jumper. He also has a range of films British in a number of different genres under his belt; films like Deathwatch; Billy Elliot and now this.The film is one that has its central character achieve so much in such a space of time, to list each and every one of them would be as repetitive just as it would be thoroughly interesting. This is a psychological study at its heart but it's a psychological study of a young man barely able to have a legal drink and still suffering from his life's prior tragedy. His tragedy is that his mother died under what Hallam perceives to be suspicious circumstances; his mother was very important to him and additionally acts as the catalyst for his journey. This is poetic and quite eerie in the sense that, even in death, she is still contributing to Hallam's maturity and lifetime ordeals.The film is cause and effect for the best part, but it's that realistic and psychological affecting cause and effect that often make for the most interesting studies. One thing occurs, then something else; then Hallam's sister goes off to university as Hallam contemplates the 'loss' of another family member which in turn makes Julius and his new partner (Hallam's stepmother) Verity (Forlani) want him to leave. This embeds more distrust and, ultimately, hate within Hallam and spawns a certain sexual encounter which forces him away and onto his adventure.While the film is all those things in terms of narrative, the study is one that goes a little deeper. The makers of the film do not hold back on any visual indication this might be about voyeurism, as if they're so desperate to get the point across through fear it might go straight over our heads. To achieve this, they give Hallam binoculars; they have him look through them most of the time; they have him live in a clock tower clearly giving Hallam a vantage point over his chosen subject and they even begin their film with Hallam's 'look' over one character showing affection to another.Additionally, Hallam as a character is given a very peculiar stature. He jumps and hops from tree to tree initially in a rural environment, spying and keeping up to speed on what's around him. He will later do so amidst chimney pots and on roofs in Edinburgh following the leaving of home, even scaling gutter pipes to evade predators when mistaken for a drug dealer. Short, tiny scenes like that reinforce the study of Hallam's build and remind us that he is this odd individual in both movement and stature.This brings the film onto the bigger picture. Pure and simple, amidst all the coming of age and self discovery, it's about a young and immature boy's distorted views or viewpoint on women. He gazes at a young girl and her partner kissing and so forth in the forest at the beginning before incurring the wrath after interrupting; he shares a joke at the dinner table to do with his stepmother looking like a prostitute; he is blackmailed and seduced away by a woman much older than him and already in a relationship with his father but the biggest piece of evidence is the fact he mistakes a woman as his mother once in Edinburgh and actually falls in love with her.The girl is Kate, played by Sophia Myles. What Myles does is play the role as a double sided coin; a role that probably won't go down well with female audiences but one that evokes a sort of professionalism whilst at work; in a suit while she keeps everything as if it were business as usual. When out of work, she becomes something else: not a loose cannon in terms of sleeping around but something desirable and easy to get along with. Hallam Foe has all this going on in terms of narrative, genre and study. It's an unpredictable film that grips and entertains in equal fashion without ever loosing the audience amidst its content and is all the more better for it.

MISTER FOE (aka HALLAM FOE) is another dark film about buried pain and insecurities, much like director David Mackenzie's YOUNG ADAM. Mackenzie is also responsible for the crackling screenplay adapted from the novel by Peter Jinks, the story of a young lad named Hallam (Jamie Bell) damaged by his mother's death/?suicide to the point where he separates himself from the world by living in a tree house, observing his father (Ciarán Hinds) in his too rapid replacement of Hallam's mother with the dangerous Verity (Claire Forlani). A bizarre 17-year-old, Hallam attacks his fears and the world dressed in a manner of beast like costumes, all to assuage his grief for his mother's death. When Verity's behavior drives Hallam from his elegant home, he retreats to Edinburgh, becoming a boy of the streets. One day he spies a woman named Kate (Sophia Myles) who greatly resembles his dead mother and he begins stalking her, spying on her in every conceivable way until he convinces her to hire him in her hotel as a kitchen porter. Proximity feeds obsession and Hallam discovers that Kate is having an affair with a married hotel executive, the result of which is a clash with reality, and Hallam must confront his Oedipal desires with his coming to grips with the reality of his grief for this deceased mother. The discovery he makes with Kate transfers to his relationship with his own family and opens doors for growth rather than maintaining his jail- like mental anguish. The story is bizarre and very dark at times, but the performance by Jamie Bell, well accompanied by those of Hinds, Forlani, Myles et al, make this tale of coming of age fascinating. The art direction (Caroline Grebbell), cinematography (Giles Nuttgens) and musical score (as concocted by Matt Biffa from performers such as Future Pilot A.K.A.) enhance the production - maintaining the high standards set by Mackenzie. Hallam is a lad we grow to love despite his kooky behavior: few other actors could inhabit this role with the élan of the considerably talented Jamie Bell. Recommended. Grady Harp