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A film review by Brandon Voss - Copyright © 2005 Two Queens, Inc. "Concessions" It’s not always a mistake to star in your own film - as long as you’ve got talent. Case in point: Crutch, Rob Moretti’s riveting yet unsettling film closely based on his own troubled youth. Writer-director Moretti plays Kenny, the handsome thirtysomething theater coach who seduces his student, David (Eben Gordon), an impressionable teenager contending with an alcoholic mother and an absent father. This inappropriate and unhealthy relationship ultimately leads David down a heartbreaking path of substance abuse and self-destruction. Well-written, cleverly crafted and finely acted, this smart drama is full of characters you just want to reach through the screen to shake, slap or save. Moretti doesn’t waste a single moment in sharing his very personal story, available now on DVD (www.ardustry.com/ahe).
A film review by Anita Gates - Copyright © 2004 The New York Times "Sixteen and desperate with no one to lend an ear." Everybody in David's life is an idiot except David (Eben Gordon) himself, a good-looking 16-year-old in suburban New Jersey. When his parents separate, his mother, Katie (Juanita Walsh), takes to alcohol in a big way. She is soon admitted to a rehab center after receiving 27 stitches in her chin from a fall she was too drunk to feel. David's brother and sister don't want to deal with Mom now that she's a mental invalid, so they just don't. The burden falls on David. You would think that someone would be on his side and listen to his troubles. For a while, that person is the gorgeous new drama teacher, Kenny (Rob Moretti), but it turns out that Kenny just wants sex. This is something David, who is as straight as an arrow (well, he has a girlfriend), has never thought of, especially not with a man in his 30's. But David falls into a relationship with the older man, which leads directly to his drug problems. And Kenny isn't even gracious enough to be happy for David when he gets the first movie role he auditions for. At least that's how David sees it. Mr. Moretti, who wrote and directed this self-conscious but nicely structured drama, has made it very clear that David is his alter ego and that these things really happened to him. Moviegoers could probably guess that; the film has the feel of being told because it happened, not because the meaning gleaned from it needed to be expressed. ''Crutch'' doesn't have the texture or power of ''Blue Car,'' Karen Moncrieff's 2002 film with Agnes Bruckner as the neglected, emotionally needy teenager and David Strathairn as the high school poetry teacher who takes advantage. ''Crutch,'' which opens today at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan, does sound a note of real anguish, however. David begins the film by telling an unseen audience, ''She found her escape, and I found mine.'' But the film also has Zack (Tim Loftus), a shopkeeper who is one of the most offensive gay screen characters in recent memory. Why is his over-the-top swishiness sure to make audiences cringe while Sean Hayes's similar style as Jack McFarland on the sitcom ''Will & Grace'' is adorable? Maybe it's the old story about the importance of an actor loving his character. ANITA GATES Published: 09-17-2004, Late Edition - Final, Section E, Column 4, Page 13
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A film review by Don Willmott - Copyright © 2004 filmcritic.com
Two facts to ponder: Crutch is "based on a true story," and Rob Moretti is not only one of the lead actors but also the writer, director, editor, and producer. The result: Crutch comes across as an extremely personal exorcism of Moretti's suburban gothic adolescence, for better and for worse. Like the scribblings in a teenager's diary, the film vacillates between insight and exaggeration. Moretti has quite a story to tell. Sixteen-year-old David (Eben Gordon), the surrogate for Moretti, lives in a broken home with his rapidly deteriorating alcoholic mother (Juanita Walsh) and two sullen siblings. Dad (James Earley) lives across town with another woman, and the family's method for coping with all this drama is to maintain a chilly silence. When not scribbling frantically in his well-worn diary, David finds distractions with his pretty girlfriend Julia (Jennifer Laine Williams). Together, they sign up for an acting class led by new-in-town thirtysomething Kenny (Moretti) and his sidekick Maryann (Jennifer J. Katz). Within minutes, Kenny starts a not-so-subtle dance of seduction with David, who is too distracted by his family problems to pick up on the signals&ldots; at first. Once David's mom is tossed into rehab, David, feeling adrift, starts clinging to Kenny, and before long, the two are happily intertwined in a drug-fueled affair. "I was impressionable," David says in his retrospective narration. Meanwhile, Maryann tells Kenny, "All I'm saying is that you should be careful." Indeed. Kenny, who we learn was a successful actor who lost it all in a shameful spiral of drugs and self-hatred, is an utterly unsympathetic (but good-looking) lout, a sexual predator who spends half the film committing various felonies and misdemeanors, albeit with the consent of young David. Looking for advice as the relationship sours, David turns to Zack (Tim Loftus), a local bookshop clerk whose over-the-top swishiness, the likes of which hasn't been seen on screen since The Boys in the Band, stops the film dead in its tracks not once but twice. It's an egregious directorial mistake in a film that otherwise does a great job of capturing the gritty textures of a typical middle-class New Jersey suburb. How strange it must have been for Moretti to write and then play the role of the man who seduced him as a teenager. Unlike the other characters in the film, the Kenny he's created is one-dimensional, a troublemaker who keeps making trouble and who doesn't earn a bit of understanding or forgiveness from the audience. You have to wonder if the man who inspired the character of Kenny will see this film and what he'll think of it. (For a much more nuanced portrayal of a suburban pedophile on the loose, see the fascinating L.I.E.) Crutch does succeed in creating an intimacy with the audience. The story is so personal that you can't help but feel like a voyeur trapped in the small houses and apartments where most of the action takes place. When Mom splits open her chin in a drunken stupor and blood spreads everywhere as David helps her down the stairs, you almost want to wipe the blood off your own hands. It's hard to believe that Moretti's real-life experience was quite as dramatic as the melodrama he's written, but Crutch has its moments, and at least you know that Moretti made it through his troubles and became a productive moviemaker. There could have been far unhappier endings.
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In this independent coming-of-age drama, David (Eben Gordon) is a 16-year-old boy living in New Jersey, who has been forced to grow up in a hurry. David's father, Jack (James Earley), has decided to leave Katie (Juanita Walsh), his wife, and David's mother. Katie, who has long had a problem with alcohol, quickly sinks deep into drink, and as his siblings distance themselves from the situation, David finds himself taking care of his mother and running the household. David has an interest in acting, and in an effort to escape from his troubles at home, he immerses himself in his school's theater program. David begins to bond with Kenny (Rob Moretti), his drama teacher, but he soon realizes that Kenny's greatest interest in him is sexual. While David feels no physical attraction to men, he succumbs to pressure from Kenny and finds himself in a relationship with his teacher. Desperate to blot out the troubling emotions that envelop him, David begins drinking and using drugs, with unhappy results. Crutch was the first feature film from Rob Moretti, who wrote and directed the picture, also playing Kenny. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide |
