One Good Film: "Short Term 12" (2013)
Brie Larson, LaKeith Stanfield, Rami Malek, and Kaitlyn Dever star in a touching drama about the stresses and rewards of caregiving.
A regular feature for paid Watch List subscribers: I suggest one reasonably under-the-radar movie from the recent or distant past, and you do what you want with that information.
“Short Term 12” (2013, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, streaming on multiple platforms, for rent on Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, and elsewhere)
A beacon of hope in a week you could probably use one.
Writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton’s second feature film is a successful expansion of the 2008 short, a prize-winner at Sundance, that fictionalized his own experiences as a counselor at a county-run residential treatment facility for troubled teens. The short is a nearly perfect piece of work that, sadly, is not currently available for streaming; the feature pads the drama out in ways you occasionally feel but that in no way diminishes the story’s essential compassion. One enjoyable aspect of watching this ten years after it was released is seeing so many young actors who have gone on to bigger things: Brie Larson, two years ahead of her Oscar win for “Room,” in the lead part of the facility’s general manager with skeletons of her own in the closet; a boyish LaKeith Stanfield (“Sorry To Bother You,” “Knives Out,” TV’s “Atlanta”) reprising his role from the short as a frightened kid about to age out of the system; Kaitlyn Dever (“Booksmart”) as a snotty, wounded new arrival; Rami Malek (“Bohemian Rhapsody”) and Stephanie Beatriz (“Brooklyn Nine-Nine”) in smaller roles as fellow staff members. Arguably, though, the lesser-known John Gallagher Jr., as a staffer and Larson’s boyfriend, has the movie’s most touching scene in his anniversary salute to his own foster parents -- a teary, happy celebration of grown children, of all different sizes and shapes, toasting the two people who saved them.
I wrote in my 2013 Boston Globe review of “Short Term 12” What’s immediately disarming about the movie is that it focuses not on the kids’ dramas — and on the ways Hollywood tends to resolve them in time for the end credits — but on the low-key hum of daily interaction the facility provides. The meds and room searches, yes, but also the morning meetings with their in-jokes, the small feuds, the unexpected alliances. Gallagher’s Mason opens the film with a spectacular anecdote about tailing an AWOL teen across the city — the staffers can’t touch the kids once they leave the facility — while fighting off the effects of a particularly virulent taco, and the running gag (as it were) is that every kid in the place knows the story. It’s why they love him and trust him. Behind everything here is so much loss. Cretton is wise enough to lean harder on the small, more human moments than on the traumas the characters know are waiting to pounce.
The director has also gone on to bigger things: He made the solid, little-seen death row drama “Just Mercy” (2019) before being sucked up by the Marvel juggernaut for “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” (2021) and its upcoming sequel. “Short Term 12” is a reminder that Cretton started off with tales of real-life superheroes taken from his own life. So what if he made the same movie twice? Maybe he just loved the place and its people so much, he wanted to give us more of them.
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