"And once they were in the chamber, how long did it take? Like a minute? Five minutes?"
Todd Bowden
Apt Pupil is a quirkly little number made by Bryan Singer after 1995's The Usual Suspects. It's wrong to put him in the same category as Kubrick, DePalma, or Cronenberg but then perhaps that isn't the point. The story revolves around a teenager (Brad Renfro) stalking an old man (Ian McKellen) who turns out to be a major Nazi war criminal. As Todd Bowden, he blackmails Dussander (McKellen) into divulging his secrets and tell him what it was really like in the camps. that, at least, is what Todd says he wants. "I want to hear about it," he says. "The stories. Everything. Everything they're afraid to tell us in school."
Apt Pupil adapts a Stephen King novella but Singer turns into a much more frightening allegory about the seduction of American power and privilege. “It is a privilege of boys to be truthful,” Dussander tells Todd's parents. “A privilege that men have to sometimes give up.” Not as deep as the film believes itself to be but a very fine film nonetheless. Some of the supposedly horrifying scenes come off as more silly than anything. Still the ending is a potent one though it diverges largely from the book's ending.
No comments:
Post a Comment