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Unfocused scripting hinders earnest production every time..., 12 August 2008

Author: MrGKB from Ohio

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

...and "Joshua" is no exception to the rule. Leads Sam "Galaxy Quest" Rockwell and Vera "The Departed" Farmiga turn in respectable work as the harried parents of a brand new colicky baby girl, while newcomer Jacob Kogan achieves decidedly mixed results as the young son suffering from an exceptional sibling rivalry, but documentarian George "Hell House" Ratliff's vision (he co-wrote with tyro David Gilbert) lacks dramatic clarity. Syd Field would not be happy with Ratliff & Gilbert's screenplay. It takes too long to drop the hook, lacks any real tension to be a genuine thriller (despite some refreshingly unsettling music from Nico Muhly and some nice DP work from Benoît "Day Night Day Night" Debie), has little more than a few boo!s in the fright department, and ultimately fails to satisfy with its haphazard thematic explorations and ambiguous (or is it?) ending.

Young Kogan plays a creepy Stepford son gone bad, and is blessed to have the particular musical talent required by the script, but said script makes him more of a McGuffin than a character. He's one-dimensional and mostly inexplicable, so observably "different" that one wonders why his parents haven't noticed how thoroughly different he is from a normal 9-year-old. Then again, the script paints them as fairly lousy parents. The father's a workaholic, the mother's a neurotic mess; the gay uncle's the only family member who can relate to Joshua. It all adds up to one "oh, c'mon!" too many: how did things get to this sorry state in the first place? How has no one noticed just how weird Joshua is? Unfortunately, we never get an answer; Joshua remains an enigma to the end, and as a result, the audience has no sympathy for the beleaguered parents, nor any fears for the oblivious uncle.

With a tighter, more sensible script and better dialog, "Joshua" might well have been a genuine thriller. Ratliff's deliberately oblique direction and writing defang the narrative arc, however, and leave us at film's end wondering, as Peggy Lee once sang, "Is that all there is?"