I saw this movie at the South By Southwest film festival. I didn't really want to go but I was there with some friends who really wanted to see it so I came along.
Having come from a pretty close-knit family and not one with a lot of problems, I never really stopped to consider how drastically different my life would have been, would be, if I had been adopted by someone else. What if I had different parents, a different circumstance, hand't gotten away with some of my pranks in high school? Not that I had never given this thought, but "Bondage" really made me look at it from an entirely different point of view.
This movie showed me dysfunction from the inside. I got to see what Juvenile Hall looks like, feels like. I felt what it was like to have your own parents betray you. I got the vicarious thrill of running from the cops, deceiving authority figures and wanting to get away with it. I also gained some insight into the world of Psychiatry.
About psychiatry... this started me reading the book "Toxic Psychiatry" which is mentioned on the IMDb page for "Bondage". It is amazing to me, just like the director mentioned at the end of the Q&A (yes, I stayed for that), what a huge industry is built around more or less creating these labels, these alleged mental disorders and then medication youth with expensive drugs. This satisfies a "Toxic Parent" into believing that they are absolved of responsibility and that the child just has some "chemical imbalance". This aspect of the film was particularly thought-provoking and eye-opening for me.
The hero, Charlie Edwards, is such a perfect anti-hero. He might be the only sane person in the movie. The world outside of him might have the chemical imbalance, or some kind of imbalance. But what's cool is that there seems to be nothing preachy about this movie at all. In fact, the audience was laughing quite a bit through it and there are some pretty emotionally hardcore moments. It can be very intense at times, and then just innocent and funny at others.
I would recommend this to all of my friends. It's been 9 days now since I've seen it and I still can't get "Bondage" out of my head. This is the kind of movie, like "Fight Club" that I would see again and again.
