Take pills, feel nicer

TERRI (2011)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Terri (Jacob Wysocki) is a heavy-set high-school kid who is indifferent to his surroundings. When he walks to school, he dresses in pajamas and angrily tosses his knapsack on the field. When Terri is home, he cares for his Uncle James (Creed Bratton) who needs his meds to stay sharp, but otherwise the old man is an emotionless vegetable. Terri also plants mouse traps in his house and reads "Gulliver's Travels." Anything, one would assume, to bring some light into this dreary world.

"Terri" is the kind of independent picture that I have heard people groan on about. It is small-town life where everything is offbeat and where "stuff happens" that could only appeal to those who have outgrown Hollywood fantasies. Only "Terri" deals with details of small-town life and high-school in an implicit comical manner. Take the character of Heather (Olivia Crocicchia), a young girl who succumbs to getting fingered during cooking class by a male high-school student. There is something funny about the fact that this girl thinks such a public act of indecency wouldn't induce wandering eyes, especially Terri's. When Terri has to visit the assistant principal once a week (the principal is played by John C. Reilly), the school official occasionally wears shades and mimics shouting at his students to please his slowly- withering-away secretary.

Most of the film "Terri" tells its story in an unhurried and very matter-of-factly manner. One extended sequence stands out where Terri, Heather and another troubled outcast, Chad (Bridger Zadina), drink some whisky and take some pills to feel "nicer." It is a startling sequence because it is a bit unsettling and we think it will end one way, and it does not. No scene in "Terri" ever feels insincere or out of place or predictable. When Terri decides to defend Heather in class, he picks up a pair of sunglasses and mimics an embarrassing TV commercial pitch.

Terri himself begins to see change in his own life when he develops three new friendships, especially with the sympathetic assistant principal. Only the film is not willing to see that change as life-affirming or earth-shakingly revolutionary, merely a stepping stone. As a film, "Terri" is filled with small pleasures and one wishes there was more, more time spent with any of these intimate characters. As written and directed by Azazel Jacobs, the running time feels like it is just enough of a stepping stone to a greater film. The fact that I wanted more is the mark of a real talent, who genuinely loves his characters and empathizes with them.