By Michael Atkinson
Context and perspective can be everything -- it's not difficult to simply view Jennifer Venditti's adroit and honest documentary "Billy the Kid" (2007) as a sympathetic portrait of a working-class high schooler inflicted with Asperger's. You can, if you insist on doing so, take it clinically, or as yet another small-framed nonfiction slice of life bearing with it a fashionable special-needs public issue. Too bad about Billy P., a 15-year-old Maine kid living in a converted mobile home with his remarried mom, remembering an abusive father, and mixing uncomfortably with his neurotypical teenage contemporaries in school, who largely tolerate him but keep him at arm's length. Billy himself is a lively piece of work, chattering endlessly from a headful of old movies and entertaining dreams of being a rock star, but you need only to watch his tense body language and searching eyes for a few seconds to understand that he's disconnected,...
Context and perspective can be everything -- it's not difficult to simply view Jennifer Venditti's adroit and honest documentary "Billy the Kid" (2007) as a sympathetic portrait of a working-class high schooler inflicted with Asperger's. You can, if you insist on doing so, take it clinically, or as yet another small-framed nonfiction slice of life bearing with it a fashionable special-needs public issue. Too bad about Billy P., a 15-year-old Maine kid living in a converted mobile home with his remarried mom, remembering an abusive father, and mixing uncomfortably with his neurotypical teenage contemporaries in school, who largely tolerate him but keep him at arm's length. Billy himself is a lively piece of work, chattering endlessly from a headful of old movies and entertaining dreams of being a rock star, but you need only to watch his tense body language and searching eyes for a few seconds to understand that he's disconnected,...
- 11/4/2008
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
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