"About a Boy"

Rascally Hugh Grant, a beyond-awkward little boy and the makers of "American Pie" team up for a near-perfect comic delight.

By Stephanie Zacharek

May 17, 2002 | The loveliest movies are often the ones with a nasty kick -- pictures that don't gloss over human flaws and folly with a deadly coating of gloop, but instead sculpt them into high relief, so we can see exactly what we're getting in a character and make our decisions about him or her with open eyes. Jean Renoir was the master of that kind of filmmaking, and no contemporary director can touch him. But every once in a while, in the most unlikely places, you see his legacy carried out in a bright and original way. Every now and then a picture reminds you how easy and pleasurable it is to love mankind -- once you've come to terms with the fact that it's wholly wretched.

Love is all around in "About a Boy," but it's tucked into the nooks and crannies between wicked wisecracks, cruel-to-be-kind words and lots of eye-rolling. The movie doesn't so much envelop us in love as kick us in the butt with it, sending us on our way feeling awake and alive and a little bruised. Sometimes love hurts; other times it just smarts.

When you have to describe the plot of "About a Boy" in 25 words or less, you say it's about an immature lout who learns how to be a grown-up by befriending an odd little boy -- which is essentially true, although it makes the story (as told in both the movie and the Nick Hornby novel it's based on) sound much gloppier than it is, like "A Christmas Carol" crossed with "Peter Pan."

More specifically, "About a Boy" is about the way human beings trade information and observations and feelings with one another, and about how others can sometimes make you see your way toward being the person you didn't even know you wanted to be. It's also about the ways parents unwittingly cripple their own children with their love, even by doing something as seemingly small as making them wear a goofy sweater to school.

When parents tell their children (as they rightly should), "Individuality is wonderful! Embrace it!" it's sometimes their own individuality they're championing, after having firmly imprinted it on their kids. Without being churlish or mean, "About a Boy" shows us how hard it is for parents to grow up, too, suggesting that letting your child become his or her own person might be the final and most important (not to mention the most difficult) act of shedding your own childhood.

Hornby's novel is sweet, if slight, and eminently enjoyable as a pop-culture snapshot. It's also an honest rumination on the way material goods, as expressions of our own personal style, sometimes have a value far beyond their actual cost. But while Hornby's characters were sharply drawn, his story was diffuse and meandering. The movie, directed by the team that gave us "American Pie," Paul and Chris Weitz, captures the essence of Hornby's story and sharpens the edges: It's faster and funnier and sleeker than the book, and its distinctive stylization really makes Hornby's ideas gel.

The Weitzes' "About a Boy" moves along swiftly, swerving and curving around every obvious pothole; the directors take care of every detail without spelling out the obvious for us. For once, we're simply left to use our intelligence and wits as the story unfolds before us. That should be the rule, and not the exception, in mainstream movies, yet it has become increasingly rare. "About a Boy" is as close to mainstream perfection as I've seen all year. It gives us everything we want, need and deserve without batting an eye.

Hugh Grant plays Will, a spoiled arrested adolescent who doesn't have to work because his dad wrote a hit Christmas song years ago; the royalties keep rolling in as sure as December keeps rolling around. (When a prospective girlfriend asks him, with wide-eyed curiosity, if even door-to-door carolers need to pay for the privilege of singing "Santa's Super Sleigh," Will responds tartly, and at least half-seriously, "They should, actually, but you can't always catch up with the bastards.")

Will has a slick London apartment loaded with lots of cool toys, and nothing to do but fill his days with TV watching, pool playing and hunting around for women whom he'll date for a while and then unceremoniously dump. After a friend hooks him up with a recently divorced single mom, he realizes he's hit the jackpot: Single mothers are exceedingly grateful for every bit of attention shown them, which makes them much less demanding than your ordinary, garden-variety girlfriend.

To meet more of these spectacular creatures, Will invents a child for himself and attends a meeting of a local single-parents group called SPAT, for Single Parents Alone Together. That's how he eventually comes to meet 11-year-old Marcus (Nicholas Hoult), the shuffling, Peruvian-knit-sweater-wearing child of a perennially depressed arrested hippie and music therapist, Fiona (Toni Collette).

To call Marcus an awkward kid is an understatement: At school, even the little Pakistani computer nerds, the lowest fishies in the schoolyard pond, inform him solemnly that he can't hang out with them anymore. We know the kid's really in trouble when we see his mother, her ethnic earrings dangling cheerfully in cruel contrast with her dour, tear-stained face, sprinkling the morning breakfast cereal into bowls: It's called Ancient Grains.

It takes forever for Will to warm up to Marcus, which is one of the great joys of "About a Boy": Any transformation that's going to stick can't be easy, so we relish the long, stretched-out moments in which Will finds dozens of ways to tell Marcus to buzz off. Their friendship isn't a sudden click; it's more of a gradual erosion, the sort of thing that eventually turns beach glass back into sand, with Marcus doing the grinding. The evolution of their friendship is charted cleverly in a montage that shows Marcus, day after day after day, ringing Will's doorbell after school and plopping himself down on the couch, despite Will's obvious protestations, as if it were the world's most eminently reasonable act.

Next Page: A hippie in a "Yeti costume" and Hugh's adorable crow's feet

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