He Likes to Watch
There tend to be two poles when it comes to making semiautobiographical movies about one’s childhood, and both are designed to make the viewer cry. There’s the “those were the good old days” approach (see My Dog Skip or Stand By Me), usually depicting the time in a young boy’s (or, more rarely, girl’s) life when some great lesson was learned and now everyone that was around back then is dead, and isn’t that sad. Approach number two is the “my life sucked, and now you’re going to see exactly how” routine, inevitably involving abusive parents, war, or extreme poverty (Angela’s Ashes, This Boy’s Life). Rare is the nostalgia film that can strike a balance between the good and the bad, without milking the eye-ducts (A Christmas Story is the all-time champion in that department), but Jason Alexander (yes, George Costanza) has done it with Just Looking, a tale of a young teen seeking not to get laid (he knows he’s too young) but rather to watch someone else do so.
Loosely based on first-time screenwriter Marshall Karp’s childhood experiences, Just Looking opens with a voice-over anecdote from our 14-year-old protagonist, Lenny (Ryan Merriman), as he relates a story about receiving money from his mother to donate to charity, doing as asked, then being given cookies by a man dressed as Santa Claus, only to be punished by Mom, who assumes that Lenny spent the money on cookies. The moral of the tale? “Just because a kid’s story sounds hard to believe doesn’t mean it never happened.” Ah. Clever way for the film to preemptively defuse any criticisms of its realism.
With that out of the way, we open on a long tracking shot of the Bronx in 1955, as Lenny continues his narration, letting us know his father is dead and his mother (Patti Lupone) married a rather portly and obnoxious butcher (Richard V. Licata), whose very profession is driving Lenny toward vegetarianism. But there are more pressing things on Lenny’s mind than family squabbles. Like any other boy his age, he has become obsessed with sex, even though he isn’t even entirely sure what it involves. This being the ’50s, and with neither Kids‘ Larry Clark nor Harmony Korine in sight, the movie isn’t going to be about Lenny getting any. But he does set a goal that by the end of the summer, he will somehow have witnessed the act.
Unlike most kids, Lenny is even willing to watch his mother and stepdad in the act to satiate his curiosity, but his first attempt at voyeurism fails, and his stepdad sends him off to stay with his Aunt Norma (Ilana Levine) and her testosterone-fueled Italian husband, Phil (Steven Bochco regular Peter Onorati), out in “the country,” which is to say Queens, considered rural by virtue of the fact that people there have backyards. With Aunt Norma eight months pregnant, there’s no action under that roof.
Fortunately, other openings present themselves. Lenny swiftly befriends some local kids who have a Sex Club, essentially an intergender forum to talk about it (“Are you sure this isn’t just, like, a local thing?” asks Lenny, when he’s first told about menstruation). Meanwhile, a beautiful nurse named Hedy (Gretchen Mol), who also happens to be a former underwear model, provides perfect fantasy fodder. Working as a grocery delivery boy, Lenny earns her trust and gains knowledge of her spare key location. Now all he has to do is sneak in when her boyfriend comes over. Of course that’s easier said than done.
The best thing about Just Looking is that it doesn’t sugar-coat its story: The kids’ mouths are appropriately foul behind their parents’ backs, some brief nudity is glimpsed, and the score rises into crying mode only once, by which time we’re so far into the scene that we’re already involved. The adults are also more complex than usual, especially given that they manage to be presented throughout from a kid’s point of view while retaining both character flaws and good intentions.
Alexander, who has handled lower-profile directing duties before, shows that he could make a career of it if his available roles ever dry up, and screenwriter Karp shows a promising future. The acting is solid on all counts, especially from the kids, and even Mol, who so often serves as window dressing, puts in a real performance. A legitimate charmer mostly as a result of its focus on story and character rather than excessive faux-charm, Just Looking definitely deserves more than just a look.
