Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		3.5
Overall		4.0

About a Boy Blu-ray Movie Review

♪ He Won't Grow Up ♪

Reviewed by Michael Reuben July 28, 2012

About a Boy was the last film that the Weitz brothers, Paul (the older) and Chris (the younger), co-directed before diverging onto separate paths. While they have remained occasional collaborators—notably as producers on the American Pie franchise that gave them their phenomenally successful start—they have explored different directorial interests. Chris ventured into blockbuster territory with The Golden Compass and Twilight: New Moon. When he returned to more intimate fare, it was with the well-received immigrant drama, A Better Life. Paul has continued the pursuit of comedy, whether low (Little Fockers), high-concept (Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant), bittersweet (In Good Company) or downright dark (Being Flynn). He has also pursued a side career as a playwright.

About a Boy balances delicately between comedy and drama. Critics and audiences generally responded to the film's tart mix of sentiment and strychnine, as did the Motion Picture Academy, which nominated the Weitzes (and co-writer Peter Hedges) for an Oscar for successfully adapting Nick Hornby's novel to the screen. The key to their adaptation is the use of dueling voiceovers by the two main characters: Hugh Grant's overgrown boy, who skates lightly just above the world's surface pretending to be an adult, until chance encounters burden him with adult responsibilities; and Nicholas Hoult's somber child, who would just like to be a kid, but finds himself confronted with circumstances that even an adult would have trouble handling.

Will Freeman (Grant) lives a comfortably detached London life of doing nothing. His material needs are covered by the royalty stream from a holiday perennial entitled "Santa's Sleigh", which is the only successful song his late father ever wrote. He has few friends, zero interest in other people, and never maintains a relationship with a woman for more than a few weeks. His latest insight is that single mothers are emotionally needy but sufficiently committed to their child not to demand too much from Will. So Will manufactures a two-year-old son named Ned and becomes the only single father attending SPAT ("Single Parents Alone Together"), where he quickly sets his sights on Suzie (Victoria Smurfit).

At a SPAT picnic, though, Suzie not only has her own infant daughter in tow, but also a twelve-year-old boy named Marcus (Hoult), whose mother, Fiona (Toni Collette), didn't feel up to attending. Indeed, Fiona's depression is so severe that, when Suzie and Will bring Marcus home, they find his mother passed out from an overdose of sleeping pills in a nearly successful suicide attempt. An ambulance is called, and Fiona is properly embarrassed when she wakes up.

Marcus takes his mother's actions weirdly in stride. His response is a series of practical plans—practical from Marcus' point of view—to snap his mother out of her depression. In this regard, Marcus shares the same oddly detached quality that characterizes Will's attitude toward people, which may explain why Marcus takes to Will so quickly. (There's also a bonding experience over a mishap with a duck at the picnic.) After quickly ferreting out that Will doesn't in fact have a two-year-old son, Marcus blackmails him into letting the kid hang around his apartment, which is much more interesting than Marcus' home. For his part, Will ends up helping Marcus improve his lot at school, where he's bullied and so much a pariah that even the nerds tell him to get lost. That all changes when Will gives him a CD that turns out to be a favorite of the coolest, toughest and tallest girl on campus, Ellie (Nat Gastiain Tena, now Osha on Game of Thrones). Her nod is all it takes to change Marcus' status.

The third act of About a Boy departs substantially from the source material, and the Weitzes note in their commentary that they developed it in close collaboration with Grant. As entertainingly busy as they've managed to make it, it has the classical structure of any movie centered on a single relationship. Will and Marcus suffer a rift, which is then healed in a spectacularly unlikely manner. A major element is Will's chance encounter with a woman who really gets to him, Rachel (Rachel Weisz). She too has a twelve-year-old son, Ali (Augustus Prew), and Will makes the mistake of letting her think he's Marcus' father. When the truth comes out, the relationship crumbles, and Will despondently tells Marcus to get lost.

Meanwhile, Marcus' mother, Fiona, remains as depressed as ever, and Marcus conceives of a grand public gesture to cheer her up, despite Ellie's warning that he'll destroy his new-found credibility at school. All of the film's elements and major players end up united in a finale that, depending on one's sensibilities, is groan-inducing, cringeworthy or mordantly funny. (All three are appropriate reactions.)

Voiceover is often condemned, justifiably so, as the device of a lazy screenwriter, but in About a Boy, it functions almost as dialogue, because the alternating voices of Will and Marcus see the world from such different, though equally oddball, perspectives. Add to that the fact that both characters are often thinking something quite different from what they're doing or saying, and About a Boy becomes a fascinating demonstration of how imaginative writing and direction can turn even a simple scene of ordering lunch into a quiet comedy of errors.

About a Boy Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Veteran British cinematographer Remi Adefarasin (Elizabeth, Match Point, Band of Brothers) served as the DP on About a Boy, and if you listen carefully to the directors' commentary, it's apparent that the Weitz brothers worked closely with him to develop the film's visual language. The two directors repeatedly note subtleties of framing, lens selection and focus designed to reinforce the story, and it's a credit to Universal's 1080p, VC-1-encoded Blu-ray that these fine points of visual design are readily discernible.

Now that Universal has set up their own transfer facilities in-house, there is a noticeable improvement in their catalog output, and it's most evident in films like About a Boy that were released before digital intermediates became the standard for post-production. Gone are the obvious edge halos and mushy lack of detail that typically accompanied such Universal releases; these were common signs of a weak image capture due to the use of a transfer recycled from the DVD era. About a Boy on Blu-ray shows no signs of artificial sharpening and has excellent detail throughout, except in areas of the frame that are deliberately out of focus as part of the visual design. Blacks are solid, colors are drab as appropriate and bright where they should be (Rachel's presence is usually accompanied by the greatest color saturation). If you look really closely, a fine grain pattern can be seen, but Universal's approach in its new transfers seems to be governed by the same philosophy that prevails in contemporary DI suites, which is to minimize visible grain to the extent possible. This phenomenon should not be confused with so-called "DNR", because it does not result in any stripping of detail or smearing of the image; what I'm describing is an intelligent translation of the film's original grain pattern into something more "pixel-friendly". (Whether that's a good or a bad thing is a separate question.)

About a Boy Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The interplay between voiceovers and dialogue is the crucial element of About a Boy's DTS-HD MA 5.1 soundtrack, and sound effects editing takes a back seat. Rear channel activity is confined to ambiance and support for the distinctive soundtrack by Badly Drawn Boy a/k/a Damon Gough, along with several songs that play a role in the story, notably Mystikal's "Shake Ya Ass" and "Killing Me Softly with His Song" in various renditions, none of them good. It's all well-mixed and clearly rendered, but this isn't a film you put on to inspire awe and envy in your friends and visitors. Deep reflection, perhaps, and even a little grimacing, but not awe and envy.

About a Boy Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

About a Boy continues Universal's recent, deplorable trend of omitting a main menu, so that extras can only be accessed during playback of the main feature, which continues in an infinite loop. Among many other inconveniences, this design requires the user to select a commentary track after starting the film, then rewind to the beginning to hear the start of the commentary. I complained about this design, when Fox made it a standard for their MGM discs, and some posters at Blu-ray.com wondered why it mattered. Now that the disease is spreading, more people are waking up to the problems inherent in the design. At least Universal includes bookmarking ("MyScenes").

The extras have been ported over from the 2003 DVD. Omitted are the music videos by Badly Drawn Boy and the DVD-ROM features.

• Commentary with Directors Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz: The commentary is a low-key, almost self-effacing affair, but it's informative nonetheless. The brothers stress that they made a conscious decision to develop their visual style on this film, and the commentary is loaded with references to their influences, notably Scorsese, Truffaut and Godard. Many of the visual elements the two directors point out are the kind of subtle touches that register subliminally, which makes the commentary all the more interesting.


• Deleted Scenes (with Optional Directors' Commentary) (SD; 2.35:1, non-enhanced;14:20): There are nine scenes, many of which are extensions of scenes that still exist in the film. The best are Will's shopping trip to acquire the child's car seat that he uses as a prop to support the fiction that he has a son, and an encounter between Marcus and the school bullies in which Ellie intervenes.


• Spotlight on Location: The Making of About a Boy (SD; 1.33:1; 10:55): The best element of this "making of" featurette is the participation of Nick Hornby, but the interview footage with Grant, Hoult and the Weitzes is also informative.


• "Santa's Super Sleigh" (SD; 1.33:1; 2:59): The complete lyrics to the faux Christmas perennial that generates the royalties off which Will lives. It should come with the same warning the FDA requires on saccharine.


• English to English Dictionary (SD; 2.35:1, non-enhanced; 2:48): I find it hard to imagine that any viewer actually needs to have the term "bloke" defined, but if there are such viewers, this feature is for them.


• MyScenes

About a Boy Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

In the "Spotlight on Location" extra, Hugh Grant relates how his initial reaction upon hearing that the Weitz brothers were interesting in directing About a Boy wasn't favorable. He loved the first American Pie film (and rude humor in general), but he couldn't imagine the minds behind that film adapting to the more equivocal sensibility that has always been the appeal of Nick Hornby's writing. Many films later, it's become clear that American Pie is probably the least typical film for either Weitz. About a Boy, which is hard to categorize, filled with difficult people and lacks a tidy resolution, is probably their most representative work. It's my idea of funny, but it's not for everyone. Highly recommended, with disclaimers.