GARDENS OF THE NIGHT (Competition)
US/GBR 2007
110 min
Director: Damien Harris
Cast: Gillian Jacobs, Evan Ross, Tom Arnold, John Malkovich, Ryan Simpkins
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It's been almost 20 years since director Damien Harris first spotted the pictures of two missing children in a milk carton that haunted him ever since. Several years of research and travelling followed and forced him to write a script entitled “Gardens of the Night”. Another 17 years were needed to get the film funded. The process of finding money allowed Harris to work on the script and refining it as he mentions at the press conference. It was sadly not enough time to give this one its final touch.

8 year old Leslie (Simpkins) got abducted by Alex (Arnold), the typical cliché of a paedophiliac psycho – a heavily breathing and corpulent pale-face with that typical sweet-talking softness of a sneaky man. He’s a wolf in a sheep’s clothing pretending to take care of two children (Leslie and Donnie) - who believe themselves abandoned by their parents - while in fact he’s selling them every now and then to solvent costumers. Nine years later Leslie and Donnie are living as street-kids, struggling with their future and trying to cope with their past.

It’s hard to criticise a film that demonstrates such an honourable intention, which is symbolically trying to tell the story of 58.000 children abducted in the US every year (half of them becoming sexually assaulted). As Harris explained, his film is picturing their journey and tells their story of losing home and the fact of its irreversibility. However it’s simply the well-meaning of it which remains. Because in fact Damien Harris (writer and director) is losing himself in the same odyssey in which these children disappear. Maybe that’s the reason why his main characters remain merely faceless and sometimes a bit too glossy drafts, too. He is too exerted in following every single path his protagonists pass through. In consequence the movie is falling apart into too many semi-finished and careless elaborated stories just because of his lack of focus. He scratches on the surface, evoking just pathetic descriptions and flashy clichés - less authentic than expositional! That’s cruel and it gets even crueller as Arnold (an abused child himself) reveilles his emotional involvement with that story in the press conference.
Unfortunately Harris’ film doesn’t work. He seems to be too involved himself and too dedicated to keep the distance to dig down deep where it would really hurt. What is left is superficial, aseptic, catchy and not a bit moving.