WhatzUp

About A Boy
by Derek Neff

When I read Nick Hornby’s novel About a Boy a few years ago, I instantly cast Hugh Grant as the book’s self-avowedly superficial cad. Grant just seemed obviously perfect for the role, so I was very pleased when I heard that he was in fact going to be starring in the movie version of the story.

But I could not have guessed how completely Grant would inhabit the role of Will Freeman, a 38-year-old Londoner who lives off the royalties of a Christmas novelty song his father wrote 40 years earlier while doing nothing himself besides consuming the latest modern conveniences and having one short-term romantic fling after another. Grant seems born for the part of Will; in fact, he makes Will seem so self-reliant and delightfully unencumbered that we can almost see Will’s point of view. Maybe we, with our jobs and our spouses and our kids, are the real chumps here, not Will.

Of course, under anything but the sketchiest examination such opinions quickly crumble, and even Will begins to realize that he can’t stay isolated from the rest of human existence, with all its problems, forever.

Things change for Will when he decides that a great way to meet women would be to attend the meetings of a single-parents coping group under the pretense that he’s a single parent himself. In the process, he meets a boy named Marcus (wonderfully played by Nicholas Hoult). Marcus’s mother (Toni Collette) is horribly depressed, even suicidal, and Marcus quickly latches onto Will as a role model, a buddy, a surrogate big-brother (if not father). Naturally Will wants nothing of it, but Marcus eventually wears him down, and soon Will grudgingly begins to accommodate Marcus into his life.

There’s a lot more to the story than this, including at least half a dozen memorable characters whom I haven’t even mentioned and a handful of set-pieces that are sure to be comic classics. The whole affair flows along with friendly, graceful charm.

The movie follows the novel pretty closely. My only disappointment is that the girl Marcus has a crush on doesn’t play nearly as big a role in the movie as she does in the book. (Also, the subtext involving Curt Cobain and his suicide has been removed altogether from the movie — in the interest of timeliness, no doubt — though I wish they had found a way to keep it in.)

But at the heart of the novel and the movie is the character of Will, and it is rare that an actor can reveal more to you about a character’s inner workings than the actual script even suggests.