This Boy's Life (1993)

family drama
directed by : Michael Caton Jones
featuring : Robert DeNiro - Ellen Barkin - Leonardo DiCaprio - Jonah Blechman - Eliza Dushku
running time : 2 hours
A single mother and her difficult son find family life isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be in this drama adapted from writer and professor Tobias Wolff's 1989 memoir of the same name. Nomadic, flaky Caroline (Ellen Barkin) just wants to settle down in one place, find a decent guy, and provide a better home for her handful of a son, Toby (Leonardo DiCaprio). When she moves to Seattle and meets the respectful, respectable Dwight Hansen (Robert DeNiro), she thinks she's got it made. Toby, however, feels differently after spending a few months with Dwight and his children and away from Caroline. The boy's stepfather-to-be seems to want to mold Toby into a better person, but to do so he emotionally, verbally, and physically abuses the kid. The marriage proceeds, and soon Caroline, too, recognizes Dwight's need to dominate everyone around him. She sticks with it, though, convinced it's the best thing for her son, and several years of dysfunction ensue. During this time, Tobias befriends another misfit, the possibly homosexual young Jonah (Arthur Gayle), while continuing to chafe under the yoke of his repressive stepfather. This Boy's Life provided the first lead role for future superstar DiCaprio. The film was written by Robert Getchell, who also penned such mother/son fare as Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and The Client.

It's obvious that This Boy's Life shares an affinity with Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore even before one realizes that the films share the same scribe. Like a '90s take on a '50s version of Martin Scorsese's classic '70s women's picture, This Boy's Life concerns the relationship between a kooky but lovable single mom and her excitable son. To achieve this symmetry, screenwriter Robert Getchell shifts the focus of novelist and short-story writer Tobias Wolff's original memoir so that it concentrates as much on the relationship between Barkin's Caroline and DiCaprio's Toby as it does on Toby's inner life and the effects of his dysfunctional upbringing on his sense of self. For the most part, though, the material survives the transition, thanks in part to strong turns from the eminently likable Barkin, the meticulous DeNiro, and the charismatic, mischievous young DiCaprio. The plot through which their characters walk may be familiar and it may lose its nuance when removed from the written page, but it's well-rendered, nicely acted, and relatively subtle for a family drama. The jackhammer, yet mealy mouthed cadences of DeNiro's Dwight eventually grow as tiresome as his character's unflinching brutality, while the film's emotional climax seems like a standard-issue ending tacked onto a less predictable character study. Still, it's hard not to like a picture sweet enough to include a chaste kiss between DiCaprio's Toby and Gayle's eccentric, devoted gay best friend. This Boy's Life may be the Hollywood version of Wolff's autobiography, but it comes off like a real life nonetheless.