In the interest of full disclosure I saw TERRI mostly because my roommate works for ATO pictures, the company that distributed this small indie feature and Sundance hit. And, to continue with the honesty, I was expecting the film to be worse than bad—a lugubrious fat-kid-coming-of-age story a la PRECIOUS, with a white obese protagonist and John C. Reilly in the Mariah Carrey role. Leaving the theatre, I was delighted to find TERRI was something wholly other than what I expected, that despite its setup and (sorry, Jesse) pretty bad trailer it is something PRECIOUS was not even for one moment: good. This is a good movie, a very good movie in moments, and one I wish more people would huff off to see.
And why is it good? Well it’s related to the very fact that is it so stridently un-PRECIOUS, in all senses. The simple storyline, a taunted fat kid plods through a grab-bag of high school moments with the help of some misfit friends and a good-natured principal who sees his potential, betrays the film’s complexity and the skill of its creators. There’s more honesty in Terri’s fat little finger than in the rotund entirety of PRECIOUS, and this honesty comes out in perhaps by favorite filmic way: lack of causation. The script is so loosely-plotted and dreamily-directed that you never quite know what’s going to happen, what people are going to say, what tone is going to be struck, what shots are going to hold, what cuts are going to pull us away from such gossamer emotional tableaus. The events of one scene certainly inform the next, or a scene five or six down the road, but there isn’t an urgency to the proceedings here. Terri just exists and wanders through these scenes, hobbling in his way, and this allows us to accept him as a real character rather than simple a conceit (Precious existed only to eat fried chicken and get punched round by Mo’Nique, Terri lives and breathes on camera and off). In another film maybe such a peregrinating pace and lack of cohesion would be a flaw, here it saves the film entirely.
That is, coupled with another element of TERRI which I love, and also saw recently in the simply-playing (and similarly-distributed) WIN WIN. This element is that Terri (like the blond-haired wrestler in WIN WIN) is something we see shocking infrequently in the movies these days: a GOOD KID. The movie prefers a more evocative term—“a good hearted kid”—but we know Terri because we know people, and we know he’s just kind of a good kid, just as we know others are just kind of bad kids. The more facile and surely-easier-to-write version of TERRI or WIN WIN is to show the kid as a guarded asshole, angry at the world for its juvenile injustices, on the verge of ‘pulling a Columbine’ or trying to off himself at least, pulled back from the brinks of despair by the one person who will look at, AND REALLY SEE, the person they are inside. Terri doesn’t belabor us with such a hoary cinematic calculation; we get something so much less certain that the only other thing it can be is true. Instead of watching the familiar character change and be reborn as someone who doesn’t reject adult authority (FREE WILLY, I’m talking to you...), we see a kid that just starts out good, that we can root for because they are so good-natured in the first place and we want them to stay that way.
And, despite the trailer suggesting otherwise (it presents the film as something of a two-hander, John C. Reilly’s character helps Terri negotiate high school but TERRI teaches his principal something about dealing with his own problems, in the form of his contentious wife), the film doesn’t pander to us with the egregious suggestion that this is really John C. Reilly’s story. We don’t meet his wife or ever see him break down and “confide” in Terri beyond a very casual, natural, relationship-appropriate way. When Terri stumbles upon John C. Reilly sleeping in his car in the school parking lot one sunny Saturday morning, we can piece together he’s been there all night after fighting with his wife. The film doesn’t need to belabor or even MENTION this, it respects our intelligence enough to allow the pieces to be the pieces and for the filmmakers to just play with them without unnecessary explanation. This is Terri’s film, and John C. Reilly is an incredibly empathetic principal, wise in such a brilliant and almost suburban way, a goofball but meticulously not weird. But it’s a triumph and even a central pillar of the film that it doesn’t delve into the principal’s personal life much, that his wife never appears, that Terri doesn’t ask him TOO many questions or offer TOO many canned pieces of folk wisdom (those all come, appropriately enough, from the principal himself...to help Terri with his own doubts and problems). This may be, deep down, a symbiotic relationship but it is never CALLED THAT, and that's why it is therapeutic or transformative for the young man.
So no matter what, don’t accuse it of being PRECIOUS: despite its indie themes, bemused tone, soft lighting, piano score. TERRI is everything it is because of the things that it so stridently is not: it refuses to yield to such “classic” indie tropes that have no truth to them, that may tie up the script but leave us stranded emotionally. Terri’s absent parents don’t reemerge and cause crisis (and that’s where WIN WIN buckled under cliché); Terri’s sickly uncle doesn’t die and cause him to reevaluate life. Terri’s weird rat-catching fascination or pajama-wearing isn’t riddled with specious psychoanalytic content (thank god he doesn’t slip on jeans in that final scene). The inevitable drug binge doesn’t lead to dramatic stakes and maudlin consequences (Terri’s friend pisses his pants, but nobody overdoses, nobody seizes the moment to steal a kiss). Terri never snaps and shoots the school bully. He doesn’t begin to diet. The film doesn’t demand narrative justice because it knows the universe doesn’t either, and it is infinitely wiser because it doesn’t have to be wise.
