MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Record’ Focuses on Aftershocks of Teen Suicides

“Permanent Record” (selected theaters), a serious and beautifully made film, has one of the best trailers in recent memory. And if that trailer and the movie’s print ads tip everyone off that school-age suicide is the film’s central issue, then I suppose reviewers needn’t tiptoe around it in print.

But in a way, this advance knowledge is a handicap. It makes us watch the way director Marisa Silver orchestrates her fine opening section in a state of jittery super-awareness. What we’re really asking ourselves is whether we wouldn’t have picked up danger signals from this ill-fated student more quickly. In life, the answer would probably be no. It’s only our advance warning that makes David Sinclair’s every action stand out like a despairing beacon.

We can see that David (Alan Boyce) is hyper-stressed. Smart, handsome, the leader of a small band, with an equal gift for music and for making friends, he takes the news that he’s one of a handful picked for a prestigious music academy as though the weight of the world had been placed on his shoulders.

Yet the movie suggests that he’s not that different from any number of his classmates: “normal” high school kids, carrying burdens of expectation--their own, their family’s, the world’s--that could fell a lumberjack. Some equivalent of a missing gene or an added enzyme, something in David’s makeup makes him snap where his friends fray and bend, but survive.

“Permanent Record” doesn’t spend a lot of time on the “whys” that follow his suicide. (Its PG-13 rating is for this sensitive subject matter.) Instead, it concentrates on the aftershocks in this ordinary, conservative community on the Oregon coast. The high school is old-fashioned enough to do Gilbert & Sullivan as the required senior production and relaxed enough so that bands of seniors meet out on the cliff’s edge for a quick smoke before and after school.

One of the film’s strengths is the empathy it creates for its dark portrait of adolescence, echoed by the tones of Frederick Elmes’ photography. More than once, the screenplay points to missed connections, between parents and kids, between kids and teachers and among the kids themselves. Although it’s not the dark and unresolved cry that “River’s Edge” was, “Permanent Record” uncovers pockets of pain and casual neglect and suggests that they’ve become commonplace.

The screenplay is by three writers, each working separately--to judge from the “and” between their names. Although they didn’t make it into the press kit’s bios, a studio spokesman did give their credits: Jarre Fees and Larry Ketron were previously playwrights; Alice Liddle is a pen name.

It’s a screenplay that would have been even stronger if it hadn’t swerved into uplift in its very last section--each student showing a strength gained from the tragedy. This may be the difference between a film made independently (such as “River’s Edge”), and one made for a major studio. Yet there is so much power to “Permanent Record,” so much in the way of detail, dialogue and performance that sets it well above most studio films about young people, that you want to forgive the tidy patness of its ending. At the top of this list of pluses are director Silver’s compassion and her fine work with actors; the stunning richness of Elmes’ cinematography, Joe Strummer’s score and Keanu Reeves’ perfectly on-target performance as Chris, David’s affectingly goofy best friend and fellow band member.

Actually, there isn’t a commonplace performance in the lot: Richard Bradford’s strong, complex school principal, Michelle Meyrink as M.G., the self-dramatizing diarist; Jennifer Rubin as the beautiful Lauren, so unsure of her musical ability; Pamela Gidley as David’s sad-eyed lover; Barry Corbin and Kathy Baker as David’s stunned parents, and Alan Boyce as David himself, a beautifully detailed and haunting effort. But it’s Reeves (one of “River’s Edge’s” pair of “good” kids), who must change the most, carrying the brunt of the pain, guilt, questioning and anger that such an unexplainable act leaves behind. He performs with relaxed vitality and an unwavering honesty.

Truthfulness actually seems to be a hallmark of the film, in both its production and writing. (Frank Mancuso Jr. was the producer.) There’s a nice sense of the hyper-romanticism among some of these 17- and 18-year-olds; a tender touch in characterizing the drama teacher’s affection for the Gilbert & Sullivan he crams down his students’throats each year; a fullness to the writing (and performance) of Bradford’s principal, caught between empathy and the front office. And whoever detailed the behavior of David’s angry, bereaved little brother knew exactly what he or she was writing about.

But to have a community put up a hurricane fence, only days after a tragedy on dangerous cliffs? That really is a movie touch. Out in the real world such a prudent action would take years.

‘PERMANENT RECORD’

A Paramount Pictures presentation. Producer Frank Mancuso Jr. Executive Producer Martin Hornstein. Co-producer Herb Rabinowitz. Director Marisa Silver. Written by Jarre Fees and Alice Liddle and Larry Ketron. Camera Frederick Elmes. Production design Michel Levesque. Editor Robert Brown. Costumes Tracy Tynan. Music Joe Strummer. With Keanu Reeves, Alan Boyce, Jennifer Rubin, Michelle Meyrink, Richard Bradford, Michael Elgart, Pamela Gidley.

Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes.

MPAA-rated: PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned; some material may be inappropriate for children under 13).