"Ratcatcher"

Some of Ramsay's touches in "Ratcatcher" are amazing: A shot of James framed through the picture window of his dream house as he runs through a golden field looks as if the boy has dreamed himself into a widescreen movie of his own devising. Other times what's dreary and what's exciting about Ramsay follow fast on the heels of each other. A scene where a simple-minded boy ties his pet mouse to a helium balloon and lets it go to impress a gang of cruel older boys is a depressingly familiar incident of adolescent cruelty. (Is there anything so unimaginative, unrewarding, unpleasant and easy as establishing cruelty by inflicting it on animals?) But the way Ramsay follows up the scene is remarkable -- a shot of the balloon-tied mouse floating through the cosmos before landing safely on the moon and joining a colony of other happy, scampering rodents. It's a nut-brain stray thought that might have made Georges Méliès smile.

And when Ramsay allows her actors some latitude to explore and express their emotions, her largely silent approach pays off. The movie's best scenes are the ones between James and Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), a slightly older girl who allows herself to be used by the tough boys who so clearly despise her. James expresses his affection for Margaret Anne with more tenderness than carnality and she responds with a protectiveness that betrays her own need for love. There's a touching innocence to the scenes of them cuddling in bed or bathing together. When they sit on the couch afterward, swathed in towels and robes, happily munching cookies and watching the news, they look as if they're luxuriating in a comfort the rest of their lives would never allow them to imagine. And the scene in which the older boys taunt James to take his turn with her, and he merely lies on top of her while she cradles his head, is strikingly original -- a guttersnipe's Pietà.

The hurt and unspoken pain in James' eyes make you want to feel close to him, but Ramsay's episodic, imagistic approach keeps us from getting to his core. Her technique takes the place of his voice instead of articulating it. The cruel realizations that Ramsay piles on James at the end of the film feel plausible and accurate but not emotionally earned. It's unfair to be asked to suffer for a character we've been kept at a distance from. And, paradoxically, for all her poetic touches the movie feels more bounded by the particulars of poverty than the naturalistic approach of De Sica and Ray, which transcended realism to achieve poetry.

I don't want to be unfair to a first-time director by comparing her with two of the greatest filmmakers who ever worked, but when you take on the subject of the hopes of childhood dashed by poverty those are the comparisons you're risking. In the U.K. "Ratcatcher" has been the most praised debut in years, and there's always understandable excitement about a filmmaker whose work shows the signs of a developing visionary sensibility. Lynne Ramsay bears watching. But when we talk about advances in the art of movies we have to be talking about leaps of feeling, not just leaps of technique.

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