Watching The Boy Who Cried Bitch left me with the same reaction after seeing Hal Hartley's "Trust" more than fifteen years ago.
"Where are the awards?"
1991 was quite a year for these grim, character-driven indie films. As "Silence of the Lambs" dominated the year critically, films like Trust and The Boy Who Cried Bitch were hanging from the helicopter rafters of Hollywood. With its modest production value and emphasis on the performances of the actors, this family drama offers more of a meditation of childhood mental health within the context of family dysfunction. It's terse and brilliant script penned by Catherine May Levin, was supposedly based on true events but I cannot find a lot of other information about the author. Is she the mother of a child with a mental illness? Was she the child, but she made the character into a boy for the film? I don't know how this story connects to her life and I am interested in knowing more about the author because it really is a well-written piece of celluloid
While the leading role of the stuttering, violent, maladjusted Dan Love - played bey Harley Cross receives most of the well-deserved accolades, the real show stealer here is the role of Candice Love, the mother played by Karen Young. This is truly one of the most riveting performances I've seen in years. Imagine the commanding, emotional range of Sally Field without the ham. Her eye movements, the delivery of the lines, her intermittent shifts between mania hopelessness. The acting is stellar all around. I would also like to give an honorable mention to Dennis Boutsikaris. He has really locked himself into quite an archetype as the soft-spoken yet arrogant Dr. Orin Fell the head psychologist of the mental hospital that Dan is confined in. He exudes a soft-evil, a passive-aggressive, manipulative agent of authority not too far from his characters portrayed in "The Dream Team" and in "Better Call Saul."
The main drawback of this film is the production quality which is fortunately saved by the performances and the script. A better sound design could have been implemented. There are scenes where the boom mic is in the shot and there is a great presence of hisses when the actors say their "s" and "p" sounds. Aside from that, I would highly recommend this film. If you are a fan of the "troubled-teen-trying-to-adjust" trope in cinema, like Good Will Hunting, White Oleander, etc., then The Boy Who Cried Bitch offers a much more harrowing, less Hollywood-feel-good, approach to this difficult subject.
