The United States of Leland

Year: 2003 Rating: R Overall Evaluation: 7.0 Significance Suppositions Story Style 7.0 / 10 8.0 / 10 7.0 / 10 8.0 / 10 Click HERE for evaluation criteria.

Style

The movie is rated R for language and some fairly serious drug content (not explicit). The cussing is unnecessary (and does not fit well) in the few scenes that it is in. No nudity or explicit violence though. There's some ugly stuff that goes on but it's all important to the story and it is not portrayed in Hollywood's typically gratuitous manner.

Story

The story here is that a kid named Leland murders his girlfriend's mentally handicapped brother (although he does not remember doing so), goes to jail, and begins talking to the jail house teacher about life. In flashback and narration we learn about the multitude of factors leading up to the crime. There is a fairly robust number of subplots going on - well, not subplots really . . . other stories that we are getting glimpses of as they cross Leland's path. His jerk father, his junkie girlfriend, her sister and live-in boyfriend . . . lots of other stories all centered around the mistakes people make, why they make them, and how they deal with them. There is not much closure at the end of the film but I think there is enough to be somewhat satisfying if you look deep enough.

Suppositions

The film does not ask much in the way of belief - it does put you in the mind of Leland but never really seems to make you think he's right or has everything figured out. More about this in Significance.

Significance

This is a rather disturbing film, it poses some big questions that it does little to answer and this can be aggravating. It portrays Leland as a troubled youth but never really gets around to an explanation (which is kind of the point). This makes an analysis of the message difficult and somewhat subjective. There are the usual postmodern wanna-be philosophical reflections on God that do not fit well with the film at all (since the subject is never brought up in the real-time story). I think the best spin I could put on it would be this: people do not always do things for understandable reasons, sometimes they do things simply because they want to. If this is what the movie is saying then I think it is a good message in that it displays a realistic view of human depravity and free will that is lacking in almost all realms of entertainment, social studies, and psychology today.

The current generation has been ingenious in its ability to blame shift. A kid gets in trouble and it's because of rock music, or his parents, or her lack of parents, or his genetics, etc. This is because its anthropology is based on a false assumption - that people are basically good. No one is perfect of course - we all make mistakes. The movie takes this and kind of blasts that idea. "Making a mistake" is actually the theme of the film - it marks the transition from Act One to Act Two and it is repeated throughout the film. Usually it is used as an excuse ("I'm only human and I made a mistake"). The interesting thing is that as various people try to deal with Leland's murder they all expose their own "mistakes" and we get to see how different people deal with them. The most telling message comes from the conversations between Leland and his teacher (Pearl). Pearl is not a great guy himself - he's a liar, drinks too much, cheats on his girlfriend, and uses others for his own benefit. He gets called on a lot of this stuff and responds with the usual "I'm only human" lines until even those are called into question. Leland asks, "How come people only say that when they've done something bad - never when they save a baby from a burning building . . . ?" He gets Pearl to admit that he wanted to to do those wrong things and that's why he did it. Pearl realizes that he had no excuse for what he did and needs to deal with it.

It is these sorts of scenes that pull us away from contemplating Leland's crime and force us to deal with our own motives. Yes, Leland, the hero, is a murderer and this should not be minimized (nor is it) - but as the hero (the voice of the message) he is difficult to argue with because he is the only one who is not trying to justify himself.

[SPOILER WARNING]

In the end he does finally crack through his shell and express sorrow over what he had done - and this I think is important. Leland is never actually said to be sick or mentally deranged, but it is apparent that he does not interact well with life. Leland sees a lot of real (and imagined) pain in the world and he feels it deeply. He thinks he must "turn it off" or he will go insane. The boy he murders is, he thinks, the saddest person of all. While this is supposed to be the key to the explanation it leaves questions as well: Did Leland murder to end the boy's suffering (real or imagined), or did he murder to end his own suffering? This we are not told. In either case the fact remains - he did it because he wanted to, that much is clear. Why he wanted to is left up in the air. The climax has Leland being vengefully killed by the boy's sister's boyfriend. The same questions arise: did he do it for the family or for himself? This we are also not told.

Unlike most Hollywood fare, this one does not have a nice tidy ending ("wrapped up with a bow" as Leland would say). Like real life there is not always an easy answer. This is also part of the message. When we search for reasons why people do evil ("make mistakes") we should not be satisfied with simplistic answers like "nobody's perfect" or "we're only human." Nor can we accept blame shifting - acting as if our wills are so fragile that any circumstance or past pain can throw us forever into a sea of determinism. The fact is that people do what they want. We do evil because we are evil. But we are also good, and when we choose to ("like during earthquakes" as Leland points out) we can do good. When we don't it's our own fault and we need to deal with it.