Fourteen-year-old Charlie's life changes when Jasper takes his help to dispose of the body of his girlfriend, Laura. He decides to look for the murderer and falls in love with Laura's younger sister.
04 Sep Jasper Jones (2017)
The Girls
As background, I am an American emigrated to Australia, someone particularly aware of embedded racism and misogyny in the US. It poisons the social contract that is behind the grand experiment that was the US. So I am curious about how similar dynamics have penetrated Australian society — a country that in my lifetime was ‘whites only’ and which purposefully destroyed aboriginal lives.
So this film. It has two Australian icons as adult actors, representing two stereotypically damaged lives — but evading stereotypes. It has two groups of children, one struggling with racism, the other with incest.
Inserted is a second story of what I’ll call ‘external racism’, bigotry against an immigrant family.
There’s a lot of ‘Stand by Me’ in this, at least on the boys’ side.
What impressed me wasn’t so much the main characters, but a sister caught in the middle, Eliza. The plotting is a bit twee to allow for overlapping dramas, including the developing child romance between our boy hero and the sister of the abused suicide. But holy cow that girl’s presence was the powerful centre of this thing for me.
Posted in 2025
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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