Terri (2011)

Did you people see the same film I saw?

Better Late Then Never

As Good As It Gets

A Major Disappointment

Terri (Jacob Wysocki), is a boy. Normally Terri for males is spelled with a "Y" as opposed to the cutesy "I" for females. This is symbolic of his role as a "victim of circumstance" in this awkward coming of age story. Terri is 15, obese and pathetic. He cares for his uncle who has memory lapses and bad days. Terri goes to school wearing pajamas and has a nemesis (Justin Prentice as Dirty Zach) who picks on him as well as is semi-intimate with a blond girl (Olivia Crocicchia as Heather) in which Terri is interested.John C. Reilly plays the semi-cool, slightly creepy, misfit school principal Mr. Fitzgerald who takes an interest in Terri's life as he is frequently late for homeroom. Terri quickly realizes that the principal only meets with misfits and is upset he is in that group. We see Terri and Heather's relationship bloom during a very bad music montage. The movie lumbers along slow and steady like Terri. At times I found myself waiting for something to happen that wasn't as boring as real life. Like most Indy movies it relishes in its uncomfortable scenes, substituting real human drama, which we get enough in our own life, for exploding heads on the screen. I admit it, I am shallow and enjoy exploding heads.If you are a big fan of Indie films and John C. Reilly this is a 5 star must see movie. The characters were unique and realistic. The dialogue flowed but was not abundantly witty or clever. There is a scene where graffiti states "Fitzgerald is a zombie." John C. Reilly played an uncredited "bathroom zombie" in "Zombieland," perhaps an inside indie joke. The movie includes some real life views and philosophy expressed through the understanding John C. Reilly. Good Indie.F bomb, sex talk, near sex. No nudity.

I was hesitant when I saw it was another from the epicenter of bad taste and cringe worthy clichés that is the sundance film festival. Media containing John C Riley, and an over weight teen has appeal like it could have some powerful endorphin driving, dialog and dialect about character and reality... Which is exactly what was attempted, only to be abruptly diluted in a mixture of melodramatic assumptions of what being a loner "teen" is like, and the shock value of implied child pornography. The Movie "Terri" simply tries, for an hour and forty minutes, to be artistic and moving, yet completely fails to develop any character or moral in anyone, much less an actual story, enough to evoke liking or similarity.

The movie's not bad but the premise that Terry wears pajamas everywhere implausible. At the first sight of this if the police didn't pick him up & bring him home or to the station and he made it to school he would have been sent right home or sent to the principal's office until an adult or Child Services picked him up. Plus its hard to have compassion for someone who basically wears the same pajamas every day which would be unhygienic. And past all this we are supposed to believe the asst. principal never mentions it? While some of the characters are endearing some are not. You may want to spend your viewing time on a different movie.

Hollywood films have their clichés, but so do Sundance indies as well. We've all sat through underwritten sensitive stories about loners where so much of what is going on is "left unsaid." It's a fine line between poetically subtle and just plain underwritten, and this film falls in the latter category. Who is Terri? Why is he the way he is? Who are any of these people? And none of the relationships here are at all interesting. Nor is there any attempt to provide any kind of psychological insight. Several times characters are confronted about their behavior (Terri in gym class, the girl regarding a sexual encounter, the principal in his office), only to shrug and fail to offer any insight. There's no "there" here. It's an empty bag, a "Sundance favorite" that has nothing to offer. This is something anyone could have written over a weekend. It's been 6 decades since Holden Caufield, and yet people still try to do the sensitive teen thing. Rent Rushmore instead.