STEALING CARS REVEALS A DETENTION CAMP FOR BOYS
Based on actual events, teenager Billy Wyatt (played by Emory Cohen, the spitting image of a young Johnny Depp), steals a car, police chase him, and he ends up in Burnville Camp for Boys. He is roughed up over and over again up by a guard for no reason other than to humiliate him and cause bodily harm until he is “broken.” In class, he is asked to read from a book, so he complies but then closes the book and recites from memory; he is too bright for a reading class, in other words. Nevertheless, Sisyphusian labor does not frustrate him. Billy makes a pass at the camp nurse, who is cautious but obviously attracted. His mother visits him, but he does not want to see her. One day he responds to a boring building project by proposing that the camp should make a drive-in theater screen, and now he has taken leadership for something that everyone respects. He befriends a fellow inmate who has a chronic illness that ultimately brings him to the point of death after guards allow other inmates to beat him up, whereupon Billy engages in a dramatic rescue. Incident after incident passes, and filmviewers may wonder why Billy misbehaves when he obviously has a lot of talent, but a traumatic event in his life is revealed toward the end of the film. Director Bradley Caplan tries to make the same point as Coldwater (2014) about the amateurish way such detention camps are run but ends up instead offering a psychological profile of a “mixed up” boy. MH