GARDENS OF THE NIGHT
Written & Directed by Damian Harris
Produced by R D Robb, Pascal Franchot & Harris
Released by City Lights Pictures
UK/USA. 110 min. Rated R
With Gillian Jacobs, Tom Arnold, Ryan Simpkins, Jermaine Scooter Smith, Evan Ross & John Malkovitch 
 

Leslie (Gillian Jacobs) and Donnie (RD Ross), each 17-years-old, have lived the majority of their childhoods together without a home, fashioning a day-to-day existence of petty larceny and prostitution. They sleep under the boardwalk, wash themselves in public restrooms, and turn to drugs as the easiest avenue for escape, yet their teenage lifestyle seems relatively tame when compared to the horrors of their pre-adolescence. Both were abducted as children, and this difficult story takes place in two timeframes. Leslie’s disjointed memories create an almost storybook depiction of the immediate years following her abduction.

“For the audience to experience and perceive everything as Leslie does,” says director Damien Harris, “the story had to be told in the hazy world of ambiguity.” The morally challenging first half, told almost in the style of a horror film, leaves several aspects of the molestation unexplained. In a culture saturated with sensationalized accounts of heinous sexual and violent crime, it doesn’t take much imagination to fill in the details. Though this strategy is effective in maintaining suspense and inducing a somber mood, it does little in the way of enlightening viewers to Leslie’s already frustrating interior thought process. We see her not as the 8-year-old girl she is, but as any one of the hundreds of this country’s abducted children.

A creepy, unsettlingly friendly and almost likeable Tom Arnold plays little Leslie's and Donnie’s captor, Alex. Together with his young sidekick, Frank (Kevin Zegers), he fosters a kind of a family, attempting to fill in as replacement father to a vulnerable and manipulated Leslie, even as he persists in abusing her. Little Donnie’s experience with Alex is less explained. The older Donnie, combative and full of angst, wears his years of abuse like a badge, making him the more interesting of the pair.

Unfortunately, a considerable amount of screen time is devoted to the tightly structured first half. After which, the audience, exhausted by the emotional quagmire that surrounds child abuse, is suddenly faced with more real-world issues to tackle. As the camera changes to hand-held mode, an older Leslie and Donnie become involved in drug use and organized prostitution, tasked with infiltrating youth shelters in search of more victims. Posing these behaviors as merely the product of a childhood fraught with the worst kind of sexual abuse is an oversimplification of the issues, and plays more like scare tactics than as intellectual examination. Most girls in Leslie’s position can’t simply decide to go home, as she can.

The film’s ending, though, poses an interesting moral question. What is the importance of the traditional family structure? As a little girl, Leslie improvised a “brother” in Donnie. Is he no more real than her actual younger brother born during her 10-year absence? We make our families in different ways, and whether by birth or by circumstance, we often aren’t afforded the choice. Michael Lee
November 7, 2008