Word: mcewan
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Discerning aesthetes might make the pilgrimage to The Good Son for the sake of respected British author Ian McEwan's screenplay, prepared stoically to endure the vicissitudes of Macaulay Culkin, commercialized American cinema and Hollywood's uncomprimising compromisal of artistic integrity. They will be disappointed. Contrary to expectations, it's the director and actors who make the most of a lukewarm script...
...audience knows the conventions of the genre: Henry will perpetrate a few grisly crimes; Mark will bang his head against the wall of parental disbelief; the stakes will keep rising until the final cliffhanging confrontation (again, literally). Far from defying Hollywood cliches, McEwan endorses them wholeheartedly. Flushed children skating merrily on the millpond when all of a sudden...; better yet: a clifftop tussle with the sea roaring on the ragged rocks below, and to top it all: Sophie's choice--a child dangling from either arm, and not enough strength to hold them both...
WRITER: IAN McEWAN...
...does in his bleak, spare novels, screenwriter Ian McEwan uses very simple means to establish an air of menace. The death of a neighborhood dog, a spectacular multivehicle auto accident, the near death of Henry's little sister in an ice-skating incident -- Henry's role in all these can be explained away by people with a vested interest in maintaining their tranquillity. Ultimately, cousin Mark awakens Henry's mother (a very believable Wendy Crewson) to long-suppressed suspicions, which leads to a stark and indescribable climax -- literally a cliffhanger, but one so nervy and straightforward that it puts...
...McEwan closes with a description of June watching the black dogs, "receding from her, black stains in the gray of the dawn, fading as they move into the foothills of the mountains from where they will return to haunt us, somewhere in Europe, in another time." And as McEwan's ideas recede on the final page, they will certainly return to haunt the reader...