Electrick Children
Directed by Rebecca Thomas
Written by Rebecca Thomas
Written by Rebecca Thomas
with Julia Garner, Rory Culkin, Liam Aiken
2012
Electrick Children begins with the sound of its own end, cut off by a tape recorder being turned on. An interview takes place between Rachel (Julia Garner), just turned fifteen, and Paul (Billy Zane). They discuss her faith, recording the conversation onto cassette. As leader of their religious colony, Paul is one of the few people permitted to handle the electronic instrument, which is kept hidden away in a cellar along with tapes of all the ecclesiastic interviews he holds with the various inhabitants. During the night, Rachel’s curiosity leads her down into that cellar, where she selects a tape at random, only to find a mysterious recording of someone singing ‘Hanging on the Telephone’. The music, unlike anything she has ever heard before, captivates her, until she is interrupted by Mr Will (Liam Aiken), a boy her age who assists Paul in the administration of the colony. He tries to confiscate the tape from her and they are discovered tussling on the floor of the cellar. Suspicions are raised, and apparently confirmed, when Rachel is later revealed to be pregnant; a marriage between her and a suitable boy is hurriedly arranged, and Mr Will is banished. But Rachel maintains their innocence, convinced and insisting that she became pregnant listening to the voice on the tape, and before the marriage can take place she runs away to the city, bent on finding the real father of her child.
What follows is a small-scale adventure that revolves around faith and music, without being completely absorbed by either subject. Rock music in its various forms opens Rachel's eyes to the world outside her upbringing. It's something she was clearly told was the work of the devil – if it was mentioned at all – but she is open-minded enough to want to see it for herself, and it is that desire for experience that informs the film's approach to life in general and religion in particular. The fact the story takes place in the slacker mid-nineties might seem like a small point, but it gives it the feeling of a period piece, while being set now could have easily made it descend into an annoying scenester-fest. As it is, the skate parks, squats and grunge clubs feel like a faraway time in which magical things can really happen. It’s captured on camera beautifully, the thousands of coloured lights that illuminate the city standing in evocative contrast to the rustic grandeur of rural Utah and the colony. I really like the Luddite 'k' in the title; it encapsulates a philosophy where electricity seems like a natural magic that opposes religious simplicity. As Rachel and Mr Will, Garner and Aiken are a great pair: she inquisitive, he stern, both endlessly innocent and utterly likeable. Rory Culkin as Clyde, a boy who takes them under his wing when they arrive in town, strikes exactly the right balance between alienated youth and an inherent decency that just won’t allow him to be that disaffected.
Instead of taking Rachel on another journey of self-discovery, or making another condemnation of religious cults and their stifling of a person’s true nature, writer-director Rebecca Thomas, who had a fundamentalist upbringing herself, delicately weaves the two together. Electrick Children is funny, sweet, and actually religious without being remotely preachy. The ambiguity of that part of the story is so well done that you can either go all the way and interpret it as a laid-back Second Coming (not Immaculate Conception, as people keep saying; that’s something else), or just allow the theological stuff to be Rachel’s way of interpreting her new experiences. Either way, it’s touching and done with real skill, and while the ending refers to any number of romance and family drama clichés, it’s so satisfying that it gets away with it entirely. More than that though, at a time when religion can hardy ever feature in a film without becoming part of a debate, Thomas's use of faith and religious tradition simply to imaginatively inform and enhance a fictional story is a breath of fresh air.
Tom
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