About A Boy Movie Review …

Hugh Grant plays Will Freeman, a self absorbed single guy in his late thirties who splits his lazy days between TV, shallow self improvement and taking care of number one. When a married couple who he counts as friends suggest that Will becomes the godfather to their newborn baby because they’re sure that beneath his vain exterior he must have ‘hidden depths’, Will reassures them that he’s just as shallow as they always assumed and point blank refuses.

For Will, the encounter isn’t all bad, because while avoiding the couple he meets and dates a single mother and realizes that lone mothers are an untapped resource. With characteristic predatory advances he begins to prey on emotionally vulnerable mothers by inventing a fictional son called ‘Ned’ to get into single parents groups. His plan doesn’t stand up to the mind of 12 year old Marcus (Nicholas Hoult) though, who discovers the lie about Ned and tries to blackmail Will into dating his own mother instead.

For most people Will would be last on the list of potential men to romance their mother, but Marcus’s mother Fiona (Toni Collette) is suffering from suicidal urges and in his innocence Marcus sees them as the perfect match. A great comedy is more than just one laugh after the next, which is why Toni Collette’s award winning performance adds real poignancy and emotion to About A Boy, making it much more than a shallow story of Marcus and Will’s mismatched couple. When Fiona is found on the floor of her apartment having taken an overdose, About A Boy gains new depths, reflecting Will’s emotional maturation as it turns out that he really is more than a nice haircut and a pretty face.

While Hugh Grant has always personified the classic English gentleman with his awkward charm in films such as Notting Hill, Love Actually and Four Weddings and a Funeral, age seems to be bringing with it new opportunities. You’re now much more likely to find Grant playing characters who would trip small children and spit on tramps than polite charming idiots, but he’s as good at the former as he is at the latter.

There’s something very satisfying about watching an actor known for playing harmless and endearing men battering a duck to death with a loaf of bread. It’s fairly obvious from the tone of the music, the set up and the opening scenes that portray Will as a selfish immature man-child that at some point Marcus is going to win him over and give him something to care about. So About A Boy isn’t a thrill ride of plot twists and surprises, but if it does what it says on the tin, it does it very well.

Marcus is the sort of child who even the outcasts steer clear of in school, but he’s an endearing misfit who clearly has a lot more emotional maturity than Will and cares deeply for his mother. He has no concept of the rules of social etiquette that Will knows off by heart, and when he falls for the hardest and most dangerous girl in school he accidentally sings offensive gangster rap to her. Like most great partnerships, Marcus and Will compensate for each other’s flaws and try to learn from the other’s strengths.

About A Boy is the sort of comforting, feel-good comedy that you want after a long hard day of work. It has hidden enjoyment for connoisseurs of Hugh Grant’s previous films just for the pleasure of watching him be a complete dick to pregnant women, animals and small children, and the laughs are frequent and original. Like a lot of great movies, About A Boy is based on a book, this time by Nick Hornby.

It has been well adapted to keep the charm of the characters, and well cast, especially with Nicholas Hoult as Marcus, who has since taken on roles which paint him as a dark sexy brooding bad boy such as in the TV series Skins. It’s not a hard decision to make whether or not to recommend About A Boy, because it’s such a harmless, enjoyable comedy that it’s going to warm the hearts of even the most cynical movie-goer.

About A Boy Movie Trailer

About A Boy (Theatrical Trailer)
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Every time we see a war movie, we expect soldier bravery stories. At least that’s how we got used to. Our pianist is not brave. He does have moral values (refusing to work for the Jewish Police), but we’re not seeing him sacrifice as the father in “La Vita e Bella” for instance. He is not shooting anyone, he’s not winning battles for his “side”.

He is the NORMAL guy who has to survive. Who’s witnessing all the war horrors and has to find a way to just live another day. His struggle is touching us. We don’t deal with a hero, we don’t deal with a war person or a brave soldier, thirsty for some enemy blood. He is an artists, he is the pianist who gets in the middle of things and, as any normal person, could live well without all this turmoil.

Wars have innocent victims. People who are killed because of their color / religion / beliefs. Citizens who don’t kill anyone, who are taken from their homes and killed or have their families destroyed for some causes they kinda don’t care.

War connects people in this case too. People who are “by default” enemies. We saw this in The Empire of the Sun, we see this here too. In the other movie passion for airplanes befriended 2 kids, here music can make your worst enemy give you a chance.

If you are looking for long musical scenes, you are in for a disappointment. After seeing “The Piano”, I would expect to hear more music being played, since I absolutely love the piano. Still “The Pianist” doesn’t have too much playing (even if it’s of amazing quality). They “save” the scenes for the really important moments in the movie. The action is fast and the plot challenging. In my opinion Roman Polanski proved once again his amazing value.

This is not a movie you can enjoy, as you would a romantic comedy or a nice animation. This is a movie that will make you cry, it will make you ask yourself a lot of questions. It’s a painful movie and yet absolutely amazing.

Would I recommend it? Of course. Do try to get some time and watch it. Make sure you don’t have any distractions and watch it carefully. It’s a masterpiece and it would be a pity to miss it.