Jake Paltrow
Young Ones

THREE REASONS. Here are three main reasons to watch this film. 1. You like stories set in a more or less near and dystopian future. I'm talking about post-apocalyptic scenarios where life in big cities is once again accompanied by what was once called the ‘frontier’ in the old west, and where water is the most precious commodity. 2. You like western films. The real ones from the past. Whether these are good American western films or ‘spaghetti’ westerns—the kind that made Tarantino lose his mind, so to speak—you love the genre, and maybe deep down you've always dreamed of being a gunslinger too, staring straight into your opponent's eyes during a duel with those close-ups and ice-cold glances like Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Charles Bronson, Peter Fonda... 3. The performance by what I consider to be and is undoubtedly one of the best actors around, Michael Shannon, who plays the role of Ernest Holm, co-protagonist of ‘Young Ones’ alongside the very young Kodi Smit-McPhee (the ‘child’ from John Hillcoat’s ‘The Road’), who, in fact, plays the role of Ernest's son, the fourteen-year-old Jerome.

YOUNG ONES. As mentioned, the film is directed by Jake Paltrow, who is the younger brother of one of Hollywood's most beautiful femmes fatales, Gwyneth Paltrow, and this is his second foray as a director after ‘The Good Night,’ a sort of brilliant comedy with a particularly rich cast (besides Gwyneth Paltrow, it includes Martin Freeman, Simon Pegg, Penelope Cruz, and Danny De Vito as well as a special guest appearance by Jarvis Cocker of Pulp) and a mix between a Woody Allen film and some Jodorowsky references with some theory and hypotheses on what is termed ‘lucid dreaming.’

‘Young Ones’ is a completely different film, although the recurring theme of imagery remains; whereas in ‘The Good Night’ the protagonist experiences images in dreams, in this film they first constitute the ambitions and desires of a man and then are projected through the visual memory of a mechanical mule, which recurs in the film as a disturbing figure and indeed becomes the contrived element that propels all the events and marks what must necessarily be a sharp passage from youth to adulthood.

It’s a different film because, although both have some magical fantasy or science fiction elements, the story is radically different, as are the settings and the choices of the director and production. The title is not accidental—the main actors in the film, excluding Shannon, are all very young. Among them, in addition to the already mentioned Kodi Smit-McPhee, are Nicholas Hoult and Elle Fanning, class of 1998, who, despite being very young, has already been a film star for quite some time, just like her sister Dakota.

The film was not a great success, and some have blamed what they consider to be the immaturity of the actors. In my opinion, this judgment is unfair. ‘Young Ones’ may not be a great film, but if there are flaws, they should be sought elsewhere, perhaps in the fact that given its settings and genre, it cannot be defined as a film for everyone.

THE CENTRAL THEME. The story is simple. We are in a post-apocalyptic near future in what are the United States of America. As highlighted from the film’s opening scenes, the country (presumably the whole world) is facing a situation of crisis and difficulty due to water scarcity. Ernest Holm is a man living on the frontier, outside the city system as we know it (they don’t seem very different from our cities, in fact) and what is defined as the ‘real world,’ where special passes (a sort of entry visa) are needed to access. He has his own piece of land and wants to cultivate it, but water is unavailable, so he lives by peddling alcohol he transports across desert lands on a mule's back.

I must say that the settings made me think, in addition to the western genre (but this is evident and clearly intentional—I read the expression ‘neo-western’ somewhere), of those in Christopher Nolan's film ‘Interstellar.’ Perhaps even Shannon might partly recall the main character in ‘Interstellar’ played by Matthew McConaughey, if only because both live in a desolate house in the desert and both take care of their children alone. But the personalities of the two are very different, and Shannon’s, even though Paltrow’s film is much less pretentious than Nolan's colossal, is perhaps more complex.

Ernest Holm is a rough man. He enjoys drinking and doesn’t hesitate to use a gun and kill to be respected. After his wife became paralyzed from the waist down (she is hospitalized in a specialized and surely futuristic medical center despite the circumstances) and in unclear circumstances—there is a veiled allusion to some fault or negligence of his—and he takes care of the two children alone. One is Jerome, the youngest, who is 14 years old, likes to draw, and follows his father everywhere, seeing him with reverential fear and as a model to look up to. The other is his daughter Mary (Elle Fanning), who has a rebellious character and hates him for the stubbornness with which he insists on living in such a challenging place, hoping that it will eventually ‘rain.’

The central theme might then seem to be Ernest's attempts to obtain water to irrigate his land and bring it back to life. But no. Because in a film ideally divided into ‘chapters,’ a technical narrative choice by the director, after being the protagonist, he loses his life and is brutally murdered. From that moment on, the protagonist will become the son Jerome, and the main theme will be one typical of the western: revenge.

THE BOY WHO BECOMES AN ADULT. The theme is revenge and the boy who becomes—who must become—an adult.

There is an apparent contrast in Jerome's life after his father's death. His sister has married Flem Lever (Nicholas Hoult), a no-good whom the father never held in high esteem, and now that the water has returned to irrigate the fields, they are once again cultivable. But Jerome is restless, and when he discovers the truth, the culprit, despite his young age and the fact he has never killed anyone before, he eventually decides coldly to ‘do what needs to be done.’

The theme, as mentioned, is recurring in the western genre. If I have to choose one in particular, I choose ‘Day of Anger’ by Tonino Valerii because it has very strong psychological and familial implications, given that at the end of the film, like in a Greek tragedy, Scott Mary (Giuliano Gemma) commits a sort of parricide by killing the man who taught him everything.

According to a recurring thought in certain philosophical and psychological frameworks, for a boy to become an adult, he should ideally always kill the father figure. I've often thought about it, including regarding my personal life. I have a very strong relationship with my father, and for about fifteen years, I've spent more time with him than with anyone else in the rest of my life and my days. We are business partners, work colleagues, we smoke cigarettes secretly from my mom and my siblings, and we are even friends, but above all, we are father and son, and his shadow, quoting De Gregori, always appears to me, regardless of the passing of time, ‘twice my size.’ We have our differences; I have my issues, and he has his ailments, but I've realized that as far as I'm concerned, perhaps I should and maybe I would have wanted to, actually I certainly would have wanted to, but I can’t. I don’t want to do it. I mean, kill him. Ideally, of course. So, I thought there must be another way. There can be what must be an overcoming. There must be, and that would truly mean breaking a chain rather than dragging unresolved issues along generation after generation.

But let's get back to the film. Here too, there are family implications. Jerome doesn't have to kill his father but avenge him. He is Orestes. Better yet, he is the young Telemachus who, in the court of Ithaca and amidst every pleasure in life thanks to the return of water and luxury goods like Coca Cola, chips, and hamburgers, faces his destiny, and this time without waiting for Ulysses to return, he confronts the suitors face to face. Because Ulysses can no longer return, and his corpse lies under the desert dust.