A Better Place (1997)

The View Askew second-stringers take on a serious subject, and it turns out much like you'd expect -- a bit of a disaster. There's a handful of nice, small moments, but they seem to be a part of a more interesting film that writer/director Vincent Pereira does his damndest to ignore. He would rather make a grim and thoughtless film about how mean kids can be, and while that's not necessarily a bad aim, Pereira has neither the tact nor the tonal control to make it work. What's even more aggravating is that, near the end, an alternate path presents itself, one that holds out the promise of grace within humanity. But it gets steamrolled in favor of the boringly inevitable nihilistic ending. It's interesting to hold this up as a point of comparison to another View Askew production, the much-maligned Vulgar. Vulgar -- which I thought was better than people gave it credit for -- had a director who started with one thing and, whether intentionally or not, sent it stumbling down avenues that made it weird and fascinating. Here the potential for a similar achievement is in place, but whenever it starts to move into interesting corners Pereira corrals it back. Well-intentioned but clumsy, crude, often wrong-headed; still, it's at least better than Elephant...

Grade: C