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*** This review may contain spoilers ***
I had the good fortune to attend a world premiere tonight at the Chicago International Film Festival. I had no idea when I bought the ticket that it was a world premiere, nor did I know anything about the film other than what I could glean from the festival's summary. But this is the kind of film you go to a festival to find. It's a small, deeply felt, honest, and thoroughly engrossing movie about matters at the core of life. "The Be All And End All" is a very funny comedy, which is fairly amazing considering that it involves us in a story that from a distance we wouldn't find funny at all. It finds emotional payoffs without being too formulaic, and it gives you characters you care about.The plot summary may well convince some people they wouldn't want to see this film, and this story may hit too much of a nerve at times for some. It's the story of a teenage boy from Liverpool, Robbie Wallace(Josh Bolt) who is diagnosed with a fatal illness, and decides that his last wish, what he wants most in the world, is to have sex. He is a teenage boy, after all. Naturally, he can't ask the medical establishment or his parents to help him with his wish, but his best mate Ziggy(Eugene Byrne) is determined to help his mate, in his words, "go out with a bang." As you may guess, arranging the details of this tryst prove rather difficult. It's hard enough being a teenage boy and wanting to ask a girl in your class out to a movie-- imagine trying to set this up, and you'll have some empathy for Ziggy's predicament.In a less-intelligent movie, we'd only focus on the kids, and the hilarity of sexual misadventures, and we'd get an exercise in funny bad taste. Here, though, even with the current of sorrow that runs throughout the film, what we get is a joy. We can see that Ziggy really would go this far for his best friend, not simply because of the strength of Eugene Byrne's remarkable performance(according to the director, this kid has never acted before), but because the story gives us real insight into his life at home-- his father walked out on his family years ago, while he and his mother have reached that point nearly every teenage boy reaches with his mother at some point where neither talks to the other well about anything. We see the pain Robbie's parents are going through, not through long, histrionic scenes, but with looks, silences, bad choices, and one genuinely shocking moment of emotional explosion. We can see the decency in a children's ward nurse(Liza Tarbuck) who learns what's going on pretty quickly, and has decisions to make on exactly what she can allow. In short, we get a movie we can believe in, one that makes us laugh and moves us in equal measure.I hope this film gets a wide release, and I hope it finds the wider audience it deserves. I was grateful to see it.
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