Foster the People

Foster the People

short-term-12

Here’s the thing: here are issues, and there are Issues. Every film, at least those with a conventional narrative, is going to have an issue at its core. Characters need conflict and crisis to butt up against, they need problems to solve and hurtles to overcome and yes, issues to deal with. That’s par for the course. Some films, however, find their characters dealing with capital-I Issues, big, heavy socially-, culturally-, or even globally-relevant stuff, so that the film is more a statement than it is a story. In a film with issues, the issues are the mcguffin because what we really care about are the characters, and we want to watch them develop. In a film with Issues, however, the characters are the mcguffin, purporting to be the main show when really all they are is a set-piece upon which the filmmakers can say what they need to say.

Does that make sense? Let’s try something concrete to help me sound a little clearer. The Dark Knight is a film with issues: Batman has to catch the Joker, and he has to deal with his childhood (or something), and I think he has to work through stuff with Rachel Dawes. Precious is a film about Issues: it’s not that characters don’t exist in the film, it’s that the film is much more interested in Precious as a representative of all manner of serious societal problems: AIDS, child abuse, sexual abuse, teen pregnancy, race, illiteracy, poverty, class (Jesus that movie had a lot of Issues). Blood Diamond’s another good example—it was a story, sure, but it was first and foremost “about” something, namely the illegal diamond trade in Africa. It used the medium of a film narrative to get across its point, and you never really got the feeling that anyone cared too much about whether the story was any good (which is probably why it wasn’t).

All of this is to say that Short Term 12 is a film that can’t help but deal with certain Issues, since it takes place in a short-term foster home for disadvantaged kids who’ve been through all kinds of hell. What’s admirable about it is that, for two thirds of it at least, it finds a way to not be “about” those things; that is, it manages to avoid after-school-special territory, and to avoid making its characters into mouthpieces for the filmmaker’s social commentary. The fact that it does that is some kind of miracle; the way in which it does that is so common-sensical that you wonder why no one’s done it before.

The film, as I’ve mentioned, takes place at a foster care facility, at which works the dedicated and unsubtly named Grace (Brie Larson), who loves the kids dearly and advises a new co-worker on his first day, “You’re not their parents, you’re just here to provide a safe environment.” The film does little more than follow the day-to-day inner workings of the center (it was originally a short film, and you can see the remnants of a much less structured piece being stretched into film-length material). Sure, Grace gets pregnant (in like the second scene, I’m not giving anything away) and has to deal with some of her own stuff, but mainly what we’re watching is the interactions between the kids and the social workers, getting a sense of what it’s like to work at a place where chaos is the norm.

Acknowledging that chaos is the norm is the aforementioned common-sense strategy the film deploys to avoid becoming a very special episode of a mediocre sitcom. There are foster kids here who’ve been abandoned, abused, molested, arrested, who cut themselves, who cut other people, who are heavily medicated for severe psychological issues—or Issues—and yet director Destin Cretton manages not to make any of that feel oppressive, because this stuff is everywhere, the natural order of things rather than the exception to an otherwise worry-free life.

That tone is established (a bit self-consciously, albeit humorously) in the opening scene, wherein the social workers smoke a cigarette before work and recount the story of a kid who so violently wanted to get off of a bus that he made Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), the social worker telling the story, shit his pants instead of argue with the kid. Halfway through his anecdote, the door behind him flies open and out runs a manic foster kid trying to escape, screaming obscenities as he attempts to get farther and farther away, and without breaking stride three of the workers run after the kid, hold him down until his tantrum breaks…at which point Mason finishes his story as though nothing happened, so familiar is he with these violent outbursts.

And so on. Other kids swear and hurt each other, and hurt themselves—though, again, when this happens the social workers and the film itself just kind of deal with it, secure in the knowledge that a girl trying to tear off her own skin is a minor blip on the radar of anyone who works in this environment from day to day. And the film’s responsible, too, in that it does own the potentially severe consequences of these situations (Mason’s anecdote ends with the kid on the bus found dead in a bush two weeks later). Turning what would ordinarily be conflict into normalcy might make the film sound one-note (what’s at stake in a world where every new emergency is as plain as stubbing your toe?), but there are surprises in store. Probably the most interesting thing about the film is the way the social workers manage to find creative ways to ease these kids’ pain. One worker delivers a single trinket to a kid who’s been forced by a psychiatrist to give all of his childhood toys away; another hangs out and draws with a girl who’s a budding artist; in the most impressive scene, a particularly difficult case named Marcus (Keith Stanfield) isn’t chastised for beating another kid with a wiffle ball bat—instead he’s encouraged to read the new lyrics he’s written after the incident, so that the workers can understand why he did it in the first place, and the scene is shot so wonderfully, in a single take, slow-zooming closer and closer until you can see the pores of his skin as he reads, that you almost want to give it a standing ovation.

You don’t though, and you end up kicking yourself for being moved by that or any other scene, because the film ultimately proves gutless and conventional in its final third. I get the feeling that if I saw the film again, I’d wonder how I didn’t see that coming, because the narrative arc is flimsy: the inciting incident of the film (what a former professor of mine might have called the “why now” of the story) is that a new kid has arrived, a girl named Jayden (“It’s a boy’s name,” she says. “I don’t think so,” says Grace. “Will Smith did,” she mutters). Jayden’s a smart girl, an artist, an introvert who announces on her first day that she doesn’t want to be rude but she’s not there to make friends. Grace becomes overly attached to the girl because they share histories of abuse; both are cutters and both have been sexually assaulted by their fathers. So the narrative of the film finds Grace becoming near-obsessed in her attempts to make sure Jayden doesn’t get returned to her father. I call that arc flimsy because, well, it is: she works in a fucking foster home, for Christ’s sake—hasn’t she run into this kind of kid before? Wouldn’t the slow breakdown that she has already have come about in an earlier case, where she tried to play hero in an attempt to rectify the crimes that were done to her? (You could make the argument that she’s pregnant this time, and that there’s a maternal drive kicking in, but that connection is never made by the film until a throwaway line at the end).

Furthermore, the film has like six climaxes—I won’t name them but you’ll know what I mean; around the hour and fifteen minute mark moment-of-truth after moment-of-truth after moment-of-truth start popping up, like a spirited game of So What’s This Movie About?—the most climactic of which is a major letdown, especially since it’s preceded by (SPOILER ALERT) the possibility that Grace was going to break into a house and beat the shit out of a man with a baseball bat (!), then devolves into standard-issue expensive-car-as-objective-correlative-for-rich-abusive-dad stuff. (END SPOILER).

Anyway. I don’t know. It’s definitely worth a look, so don’t let my mini-rant dissuade you. Far too few films like this are made and seen, films with real balls and which are more interested in submerging the audience in their world than in leading you through said world with a phony narrative. I just wish the narrative it did settle on was a little less phony. Maybe that’s just my own Issue.

(p.s. are we supposed to believe that this entire foster care facility is managed by four people—one of whom just began working, meaning that just before his first day, only three people managed the whole thing—and that these people can spend significant one-on-one time with each kid, doing things like (for instance) braiding their hair? What happens when one kid tries to lock herself in her room and three people arrive to break down the door, and then another kid simultaneously tries to start a fist fight somewhere else in the house? Seems like a remarkably well-managed place to me…)

Ted McLoof

About Ted McLoof

Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.

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