About a Boy (Hugh Grant and Nicholas Hoult)

(Amazon UK link)

We first saw the film ‘About a Boy’ in 2009, so it seemed like a good idea to watch it again. I remembered that Hugh Grant played a young man, and that the story was about him and a twelve-year-old boy. But that was as far as my memory went.

Grant’s character Will is a young man who likes to be alone, and is mostly self-sufficient in a technological 21st century way. He’s not a hermit, exactly, but believes that, contrary to John Donne’s famous quotation, he is quite happy to live as an island. He enjoys a steady stream of casual romantic relationships, which he breaks off as soon as the woman concerned starts to become too serious.

Will tries to organise his life into half-hour segments, and keeps insisting that he’s very busy. He lives on the royalties from a popular Christmas song that his father wrote many years earlier, and watches a lot of television. He’s unmotivated, and frankly selfish - but also likeable and (deep down) kind-hearted, in a way that Hugh Grant portrays extremely well.

One day Will realises that his ideal short-term partner is a single mother. So, with the dubious aim of infiltrating a group of single parents (mostly mothers) he invents a two-year-old son called Ned. He finds one of the mothers quite attractive, and arranges to meet her, not expecting that she will turn up with twelve-year-old Marcus (Nicholas Hoult), the son of her neighbour (and friend).

By this stage in the film we have also met Marcus, in a separate storyline. He and his mother are radical - almost hippy - vegetarians, and Marcus has never worn trainers, or listened to modern music. He finds school education boring, and is increasingly bullied. His clothes are old-fashioned and geeky, his mother still walks him to school, and he has a strange habit of singing aloud without realising he is doing so.

Marcus also has the burden of knowing that his mother suffers from depressive incidents. He’s old for his years, and an incident that could have been tragic forces Will to become involved with Marcus. Marcus realises that, far from wanting to live alone, he needs more than one person around him. If there are just two people who are everything to each other, he decides, then there’s nobody left if one of them falls out of the picture. So he tries, for a while, to persuade Will to date his mother…

There’s a lot of low-key humour in the film, which contrasts well with the serious themes of bullying, abusive relationships, and clinical depression. Grant is ideal for Will’s character; his facial expressions and sense of timing are excellent. I was less sure about Nicholas Hoult as Marcus, at first, but his character grew on me; perhaps the actor was somewhat typecast at the time (as it would seem from the ‘making of’ documentary that is one of the extras) but he was only twelve when the film was made. He doesn’t have particularly good screen chemistry with anyone, but that suits the role he is playing perfectly.

The other characters are less significant. Marcus’s mother Fiona (Toni Collette) didn’t seem entirely believable to me; but she represents a particular type of person quite well. And since we’re seeing people from Will’s point of view, perhaps this was deliberate. The women are divided into those he finds attractive, and those he doesn’t, in a somewhat caricatured way.

It’s more thoughtful than the average comedy, but more amusing than many films that look at deeper themes. There’s some bad language but mostly used as expletives when someone is surprised or stressed; we didn’t find it excessive. There’s a lot of discussion about sex in general, but without specifics; and there are no scenes of intimacy or nudity at all. The rating of 12 (PG-13 in the United States) is appropriate, given that Marcus himself is 12, although I doubt if anyone under the age of about 14 or 15 would be interested in it.

Recommended.

The film was based on the book ‘About a Boy’ by Nick Hornby.

Review copyright 2019 Sue's DVD Reviews