Hollow Reed

The ostensible subject of the new English drama Hollow Reed is child abuse, but the screenwriter Paula Milne, director Angela Pope, and a superb cast move into deeper themes of isolation and the desperation for love. Martin Donovan plays Martyn, a gay doctor living with his lover (Ian Hart, the unforgettable John Lennon of Backbeat); his wife, Hannah (Joely Richardson), has custody of their son Oliver (the delicately expressive Sam Bould). When Martyn suspects that Hannah's live-in boyfriend, Frank (Jason Flemyng), has been beating Ollie, the unresolved tensions close to the surface of these complicated lifestyle decisions -- fear of abandonment, competition for affection, bitterness over old losses -- burst through. And the boy, who's become a magnet for these knotted adult impulses he can't comprehend, retreats farther and farther. Angela Pope's handling of Ollie's buried feelings, which he can convey only by indirection, is perhaps the most compelling aspect of the movie; it recalls the lacerating scenes with the little girl in the classic New Zealand troubled-marriage picture Smash Palace.

On its own problem-play terms, Hollow Reed is very daring. When Hannah discovers that Martyn's accusations are grounded, she throws Frank out -- but when he lets himself back in that night and begs her forgiveness, her loneliness melts her resistance. The film acknowledges the weight of Hannah's mistake without losing sympathy for her, largely because Joely Richardson charts all of the character's contradictory emotions -- especially in the scene where, the morning after Frank's return, she races after her son on his way to school to try, uselessly, to assure him he needn't fear any further beatings. In films like this one and Sister My Sister, Richardson is becoming, unheralded, the equal of any actress of her generation.

And Pope and Milne do some remarkable things with Frank, who's counterpointed with Martyn's lover Tom -- Hannah's lawyer's choice for the villain in the custody suit Martyn initiates. The lawyer's grilling of Tom brings out Tom's acerbic side; he forgets to focus on the custody issue when his gay pride is stung. (This is Ian Hart's finest moment.) The barrister's point is clear: Frank's possibly violent nature is less dangerous to the boy than Martyn's having sex with another man in the bedroom next door. But what we see, in the scene where Martyn drives onto Frank's work site to check him out and especially in the late-night talk where Frank works to poison Ollie's mind against his father's sexual preferences, is the creepily homoerotic underlayer of Frank's homophobia. That may sound like a PC platitude, but it sure doesn't play that way. Hollow Reed transcends the banality of the received wisdom in its story (by Neville Bolt, based on a true incident) by dramatizing it. You can accept the characters' interactions because of the sharpness of observation in the script, the direction, the performances. The movie wins your trust. Opens Friday at the Avon.

-- Steve Vineberg