The adolescents of The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys may look familiar, plotting mischief to irritate their teachers, cycling around town on their bikes, and drawing elaborate adventure comic books in which they are transformed from pubescent kids into superheroes. They are, after all, just ordinary Catholic schoolboys with the problems of religion and growing up to solve.
But this gorgeous film, from novice director Peter Care (and based on the novel by Chris Fuhrman, published in 1991 by the University of Georgia Press) is a loving anthem to the very complicated ordinariness of adolescence, a time when imagination begins its passionate quarrel with reality, when art and literature may first fuel creativity, when visions and supernatural experiences occur undoubted, and when the spirit begins what could become an endless pursuit of love and redemption.
The film reminds us that the dangerous schemes of youth aren’t left to the past; they are gestures of power, powerlessness, longing, and despair that become permanent scars, badges of character. To be ordinary, and especially to be an ordinary kid, is to begin a perpetual, soulful confrontation with the ambiguous universe.
Care’s film stands wisely, and rebelliously too, against the idea frequenting popular coming-of-age novels and films, and news headlines: Adolescence is a spiritual vacuum. Instead, the funny, anguished 14-year-old altar boys, Tim Sullivan and Francis Doyle (Kieran Culkin and Emile Hirsch), recognize themselves as part of a holy vision of darkness and light they can’t understand but are determined to survive, with feeling.
As best they can they absorb cruelty, neglect, and oppression; confront “sin”; seek redemption; and determine that the soul is a permanent presence seared into eternity, not meaningless, or perishable. The landscape the boys move through is not bereft of soul -- a sense of aliveness within a holy and mysterious design -- it’s brimming with it. The efforts of Tim, Francis, and even Francis’s suicidal girlfriend, Margie Flynn (Jena Malone), to become souls seen and loved by an unknowable God is the central dilemma of the film.
The problem is, the altar boys and Margie are alone with their troubles. Sister Assumpta (Jodie Foster) and Father Casey (Vincent D’Onofrio), the nun and priest who oversee -- or fail to see -- the boys’ complex spiritual dilemmas, want to teach salvation, but Assumpta only dispenses humorless disciplinary rules, and the Father, a big smug kid himself, delivers pat sexual advice. At school Assumpta lectures on the martyrdom of the school’s patron saint, but she is only faintly, apprehensively aware of a martyrdom unfolding before her eyes.
Tim is the class schemer, comic to a fault, but he’s also seriously adrift. He causes Assumpta continual aggravation -- masterminding the kidnapping of the statue of Saint Agatha, whose martyrdom amuses him, and the sending of a ransom note from God demanding 666 Hail Mary’s, as well as scribbling sacrilegious drawings in the margins of his schoolbooks. But Tim has been emotionally abandoned by his alcoholic parents, and craves the opportunity to reclaim some of the power taken from him -- as it is taken, the film compassionately suggests, from all children when they are neglected.
Tim wants to be a hero-outcast like the Atomic Trinity hulks that the boys draw. The comic-book world is alive and roiling for him, just as the high-powered narrative animations by Terry Fitzgerald and Todd McFarlane make the still-life drawings come alive for us. Tim’s extended animated-hero-fantasies alternate with episodes of his hero-less real life. But if Tim can’t be a hero all the time, he’d prefer to be a genius -- and forgiven for his sins as only geniuses can be, he believes -- like his literary idol, the poet William Blake.
Like Blake, Tim believes in the holy power of imagination over repressive religion, the salvation of the soul through creativity and natural instinct, not human law. In fact, Care creates scenes and characters that explicitly evoke Blake’s poems and belief in the opposition between narrow, reasonable vision and limitless instinct and imagination. Tim moves restlessly between the dim light of the school halls, where the atmosphere is oppressive with cloistered, reasonable faith, and the overgrown, wild neighborhoods he explores in his free time. And, as in Blake’s poems, both worlds have a measure of God in them, and yet neither is particularly comforting, just as the closed chapel gates and the garden of briars and tombstones in Blake’s Experience poem, “Garden of Love,” exclude the poet from an experience of spiritual desire and joy.
Proudly, Tim carries around a copy of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. He loves the illuminations of spiritual awakening, because “Blake wrote it, he printed it, he drew it -- he did everything himself!” It’s a boy’s innocent admiration of self-sufficiency, but the two contrary states of the human soul Blake illustrates foreshadow the schoolboy Tim’s own conflicted innocence in dreaming and experience in suffering.
When the book is accidentally torn in half during Tim’s quarrel with Assumpta, it is clear Tim must mend himself through retaliatory creativity, by unleashing his own dark power. Dangerously, he becomes both Blake’s little lamb of Innocence and the burning tiger of “The Tyger” in Experience -- inevitably, a threat to himself. The conflict of Tim’s self-love and self-destructiveness makes him, in his own eyes, a lost soul unclaimed by any God, benevolent or fierce, and prompts Tim’s escalating demands for recognition from the world. Recognition is the nourishment for which he will transform himself, from prey to predator. “In risk comes greatness!” he exclaims.
Francis, on the other hand, resolves the pain and joys of his experience through contemplation and thoughtful creativity. His soul-seeking is meditative, not reactionary. While Tim is impulsive, Francis suffers patiently as he listens to Margie’s secret, and tries to understand all the confounding desire in the world, the meaning of sin, the threat of Hell.
Francis is attentive enough to perceive a woman-ghost (echoing an image from Blake’s poem “The Angel”) visiting from another plane of reality and is able to look the ghost, and Margie, and even Tim in the eye and know they want the same thing: only to be seen, to be accepted, and to be real. For this reason, it seems, he supports Tim’s grandest scheme: to capture a cougar from the local nature preserve and release it in the school that is for Tim, a cage. While Francis is drawn to Margie’s innocence (not necessarily sacrificed in sexual experience, as Blake suggests in the “Little Girl Lost"/"Little Girl Found” poems), Tim is seduced by the cougar’s.
“He sees something in me,” Tim says, and it is his thrill at a dark power finally watching that echoes Assumpta’s warnings that God “sees into your heart. I fear for you.” While the woman-ghost watches angelically if eerily over Francis and Margie, Tim feels watched by a morally ambiguous God he senses through the violent, yet sinless, cougar.
In a beautifully choreographed scene of destruction, Tim rallies his friends to wreck Assumpta’s orderly office and “Think like cougars!” He has gone half wild, and is eager to enter the “forest of the night” with the animal. He wants to frighten the nun and the priest into acknowledging untamed forces stalking the world. He wants out of his cage of suffering, to be free of his adolescence by worshiping a natural god whose power he can feel. Tim’s joy in attempting this makes his scheme seem playful.
As in so many films with Jodie Foster’s name attached, the intelligence of children is honored. The fragility of their souls shapes their foolish plans, their burning questions, and pleas to be seen -- by parents, teachers, friends, a kind or malevolent God, by anyone who might help them. Care’s grace and gift as a director is in marrying soulful fragility and suffering to ordinary gesture. What lies beneath each banal image makes those images frightening -- the pimply face of a boy opening a bedroom door to check on his sister; Francis practicing martial arts in a forest; a copy of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell propped against a religious icon; a zoo cat looking up from its false, unnatural habitat at Tim.
The boys may seem to be self-sufficient survivors, even typical kids giggling at communion, flirting with girls, repeating secrets they can’t keep. But when they find a dog dying by the road and Francis, childlike, suggests running for a grown-up -- “They’ve got to come help it!” -- Tim snaps back at him with the unbearable truth of their adolescence: “There is no they. We are they.”
As adults, we’re warned by Dangerous Lives not to abandon the ghosts of our youth, but to see them clearly. The wall between old and young is, by implication, a wall that exists even between the adult and child within ourselves. It’s fitting that near the end of the film, Francis reads verses aloud, a child maturely ministering to a flock, but the verses are from Blake’s “The Tyger.” He has embarked on his own quest, haunted by Blake’s lyric question, “Did he who made the lamb make thee?”
But he manages his answer, a reconciliation of innocence and experience: power gained through artistic creativity. Francis seizes his pen and draws his fierce answer, or in Blake’s own words, a garden “filled with graves and tombstones where flowers should be.” Francis’s drawing -- accompanied by heavy-metal music -- rushes at us, threatening to leave the limited plane of the movie screen and become real, freeing his rage and imagination, no doubt as Blake would have wished.
Melora Wolff teaches creative writing as an adjunct professor of English at Hartwick College. She is the author, with John K. Clemens, of Movies to Manage By: Lessons in Leadership From Great Films (Contemporary Books, 1999).
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