Content area
Full Text
Early one morning last spring, Michael Caton-Jones was on a deserted country road outside Concrete, Wash., filming a scene where the young hero of "This Boy's Life" races through the dewy pre-dawn, delivering newspapers.
"It was kind of Scotch misty," recalls the 35-year-old film director, who grew up in the tiny Scottish hamlet of Uphall Station. "And I just flashed back-physically and mentally-to the feeling of running down the road, delivering papers on my paper route when I was a kid. I just completely zoned out. I forgot I was out there, shooting a movie."
Based on Tobias Wolff's coming-of-age-in-the-'50s memoir of the same title, the movie offers a richly detailed, often disturbing portrait of our most vulnerable age-adolescence. Making the film had a similar effect on others involved in the movie. Veteran screenwriter Robert Getchell, who adapted Wolff's book, also was surprised how much "This Boy's Life" stirred complicated emotions he'd experienced in his youth as well.
"When a film draws from real life, it becomes personal for the audience, too. People relive their own lives through your film," Caton-Jones said.
Opening Friday, the movie stars Robert De Niro, Ellen Barkin and 18-year-old actor Leonardo DiCaprio as Toby Wolff, the story's ducktailed hero. An imaginative dreamer who often adopts the pose of a sullen delinquent, Toby accompanies his free-spirited mother to Washington state.
But all too quickly his mother has remarried, leaving Toby trapped in the brutish embrace of Dwight Hansen, his tyrannical stepfather. Persuaded that his stepson's misdeeds arise from laziness, Dwight assigns Toby a paper route, enlists him in the Boy Scouts and gives him such chores as husking huge mounds of spiny horse chestnuts. When Toby asks for a dog, Dwight sells Toby's beloved Winchester .22 to pay for an ugly hound with yellow eyes and a pink, almost hairless tail who growls at the boy whenever he enters the house. When Toby throws away a not-quite-empty mustard jar, Dwight erupts with a venomous rage.
For years, Toby-now Tobias Wolff, author of several acclaimed short-story collections-tried unsuccessfully to write a novel based on this experience. Stymied, he began studying coming-of-age tales by other writers, among them Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes," Frank Conroy's "Stop-Time" and Mary McCarthy's "Memoirs of a...