Mean Creek (2004)
Review by Zachary K. Parker
As I look back over the movies that came out last year, Jacob Aaron Estes’ directorial debut, Mean Creek, sticks out in my mind. Mean Creek tackles issues concerning violence, humanity, God or destiny, and responsibility.
Estes’s story focuses on Sam (Rory
Culkin) who often suffers under the bullying of George (Josh Peck). Eventually,
after discussing it with his girlfriend, Millie (Carly Schroeder), and
Rocky’s best friend Marty (Scott Mechlowicz) comes up with a plan to humiliate George, and teach him a lesson about bullying others.
They plan to take George on a boating trip, take his clothes and leave him to walk home naked in humiliation. However, George sees their invitation as an invitation to friendship. He acts with an unexpected gentleness and generosity except for brief times when the others accuse him of sin.
Estes confessed in an interview that the movie is based on his own relationship with a bully, where he eventually took a warning sign and designed it to humiliate the bully. As a warning sign against this kind of foolishness, Mean Creek leads to a remarkably shocking and equally provocative resolution unlike many others you will encounter in the movies.
In contrast to the sometimes-confusing themes and indistinct morality of United States of Leland, Estes’ Mean Creek distinctly addresses the confusion of teenage life upon a biblical foundation for morality.
In an early scene, Millie thinks up three questions to ask Sam on their first “date,” and Sam avoids answering each one by countering with other questions or laughing it off completely.
However, these questions become increasingly pertinent as the story builds momentum. I want to address these questions within the context of the movie, and consider what implications I think Estes wants us to draw from them.
“What does your dad do?”
He does nothing; he is clueless to his children’s behavior. Most of the fathers in Mean Creek have abandoned their roles for various, though similar, motives.
One kid’s father committed suicide, leaving his two sons to become so corrupt that they could not stop themselves from indulging their sin. Another kid’s father, selfishly absorbed in his sodomite relationship, is appallingly oblivious to his son’s suffering.
In the Bible, “father” carries connotations of leadership contra modern egalitarianism. Being a father has implications of spiritual discipleship within the family contending with government school assimilation. The commands for a father to love the family just as himself conflicts with postmodern calls to “be yourself.”
In our day, boys are not raised to be “fathers” except in its strict biological sense. Accordingly, men have provoked their children to wrath and crime, forsaken their calling to “bring [their children] up in the training and the admonition of the Lord” (Eph.6:4). As a result, the children have no model for living, and embrace their death—evil. Consequently, the sons often become just like their fathers before them.
“Do you believe in God?”
In contrast, our heavenly Father has ordained different, breathtaking ends for His church, His family. At one point, Marty asks Rocky about “destiny,” if everything that happens does so for a reason.
Marty voices his distaste of such an idea, throwing a stick in the river. For a moment, Estes follows the stick’s journey down the water. Marty, George, Sam, and all individuals are like the stick, whirling through the river, but unavoidably following God’s preordained path.
Only upon this idea of foreordination is God’s justice pure and complete. His justice insures that even a seemingly harmless prank, motivated by sin, is the first collapse in a sequence of events, which ultimately leads one character, by the individual’s simple association, to carve “SNAP” in a tree and coldly gouge a snail afterwards. The characters’ denial of God and His sovereignty irreversibly affects them, and triggers their breakdown.
“What’s it like being male?”
On an obvious level, the violent and lewd behavior of the male characters causes Mean Creek to earn an “R” rating. In various interviews, Estes announced his own opinion about the coarse behavior of the teenagers, reminding us that their behavior was aimed to harm each other, not lift each other up.
If we emulate the character’s behavior, or teach children to do so, then we have not learned the movie’s lesson.
Will our sons give in to the temptations typical of male behavior? If we train them to act apart from the conduct of the characters in Mean Creek, which in itself is a powerful tool to show the depravity of such behavior, then God willing, they will abstain from such sin, and faithfully pursue their callings.
The characters do not make the effort to minister to George, but they first plan to humiliate him. Christ suffered the greatest humiliation in order to secure forgiveness—salvation—for us. The characters come to a point where they must make choices as to whether forgive George, or to satiate their own foolish vengeance.
Christ is the greatest model for living, but will the characters follow Him, forgive the sinner, and let God enact vengeance upon the ungodly?
Essentially, will the characters abdicate their responsibility like their fathers? How will they budget their relationships? The movie’s answer demonstrates the answer to not being male, but to being a man. Mean Creek is, as it claims, a tale about the loss of innocence. Nonetheless, it is also a tale about the profit of grace.
Jacob Aaron Estes’ Mean Creek is a tense, poignant narrative, which jars our generation’s apathy and amorality. In a way, Estes’ movie is the outstanding successor of Rob Reiner’s admirable Stand by Me, and “teenage” predecessor of David Fincher’s terrific Fight Club.
Its biblical base, beautifully artistic execution (and powerful performances from the superior-to-Dakota Fanning, Carly Schroeder, and the equally amazing Scott Mechlowicz), and the call to heed the movie’s warning sign, I think, make it one of the best films of 2004.