Apt Pupil
USA/France 1997
Reviewed by Kim Newman
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Santo Donato, California, 1984. Sixteen-year-old Todd Bowden becomes fascinated by Nazi war crimes while writing an essay on the subject. He recognises that local resident Arthur Denker is really Kurt Dussander, once the commander of Patin concentration camp. Todd takes fingerprints to confirm the identification, then approaches Dussander and threatens him with exposure unless he tells Todd stories about the Holocaust. Todd buys a Nazi uniform and makes Dussander wear it.
Months pass. Haunted by nightmares, Todd starts to fall behind with his schoolwork. Dussander poses as Todd's grandfather for an interview with school counsellor Edward French, then forces Todd to work until he gets straight 'As'. Dussander points out that their relationship has gone on for so long his exposure would prove disastrous for Todd too. Archie, a tramp who glimpsed Dussander wearing his Nazi costume, inveigles his way into the house. Dussander has a heart attack while trying to murder him. He calls Todd, then locks him in the basement with the wounded Archie. Todd kills Archie, and an ambulance is called for Dussander.
In hospital, Dussander is recognised by a fellow patient who was an inmate at Patin. The authorities interrogate Todd, who is not suspected of any wrongdoing. As Todd gives the valedictorian speech at his high-school graduation, Dussander commits suicide to avoid trial in Israel. Realising Dussander was not Todd's grandfather, French threatens a further investigation of their relationship. But Todd threatens to accuse French of making homosexual advances to students and cows him into silence. Todd plans to go to college.
Review
Bryan Singer's first feature Public Access was an almost non-supernatural adaptation of Stephen King's novel Needful Things. In it, a stranger in town uses a cable-television slot to bring out all the suppressed nastiness of the apparently archetypal good citizens. Apt Pupil, Singer's follow-up to his breakthrough The Usual Suspects, returns to King territory. It's adapted - as were Rob Reiner's Stand by Me and Frank Darabont's The Shawshank Redemption - from a novella in the 1982 collection Different Seasons. King's first attempt to emerge from his self-created modern horror genre and essay more ambitious literary efforts, this assembly has the feeling of raw America, stripping naked the everyday horrors King usually dresses up with vampires and ghosts. Though one of the best things King has ever written, 'Apt Pupil' has proved problematic for would-be adapters - an earlier filming, starring Ricky Shroeder and Nicol Williamson, was abandoned after financing fell through.
The story could have been reduced to two people spinning yarns that feed each other's fantasies (which are sometimes most persuasive when least truthful). It would have been natural for Singer to mount it exactly in the style of The Usual Suspects, with dramatisations of Dussander's stories and Todd's tales of detective work. However, he refuses to dramatise even the most truthful anecdotes (Todd's explanation that he has identified Dussander through fingerprints sounds unlikely, but is later confirmed by a throwaway shot). Instead, Singer relies on getting close to two remarkable performances to convey the shifting fascination between a Nazi war criminal and an all-American boy. We get surprisingly few scenes of Todd's life away from Dussander, though we sense the slipping of his normal relationships through an argument with his best buddy and a failed tryst with a girl. In fact, Singer prunes away much extraneous material from the novella, which ends with an exposed Todd becoming a freeway sniper.
What is most admirable about the film is how genuinely complicated its central relationship is. It is heavily hinted, not only by the casting of gay activist Ian McKellen, that there is a homoerotic undertone to the attraction between his character and often shirtless teenage boy. But the significance of the scene in which the girl can't arouse him and wonders if he's interested in girls at all is that his awareness of horror has blotted out all kinds of sexuality. A gay undertone is also present when, during a shower scene, Todd imagines he sees not healthy football players but shrunken camp inmates. Even more explicitly, Dussander lets a tramp think he's about to take sexual advantage of him when he's actually reaching for a knife. This scene, which features a weird cameo from Elias Koteas in an extraordinary jumper as the tramp, climaxes with a classic dialogue exchange as Archie offers his body with, "don't worry, I've done this before," and Dussander slips in the blade with a sad, self-amused, "So have I."
The exchanges of power between the two central characters are beyond the sexual. The film is deeply disturbing not only in the effective but obvious scene as Todd makes the old man put on a theatrical Nazi uniform like a little girl playing with a Klaus Barbie Doll, but also in the creepy interview scene where Dussander's Grandpa Walton act persuades the school counsellor to give Todd another chance. Though anchored in the Holocaust, Dussander represents a larger, possibly Satanic, European evil that finds its younger successor in Todd's high-school valedictorian. There is never any discussion of why Dussander became a Nazi or indeed of his politics and beliefs. He is just a plausible monster, recognising that Todd has the potential to be just like him. It is a credit to McKellen's sly, sad, sinister playing that the role never becomes melodramatic.
Apt Pupil lacks the flamboyance that made The Usual Suspects an audience favourite, but it is a highly assured piece of storytelling, confident enough to elide its worst horrors with a few brief speeches. It may well not find the favour which greeted Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption, both hymns to human endurance and courage, but it is the purest cinematic adaptation of a strain of true dread that even Stephen King is usually afraid to confront. Singer borrows a tiny trick from The Shining that reduces King's stream of pop-culture references to snippets from junk television, somehow disturbing in this context: Mr Magoo, I Dream of Jeannie, The Jeffersons. The film is set in 1984 simply because it is impossible to conceive of a Nazi senior enough to command a concentration camp as anything but a senile invalid in the present day. However, the finale - as Todd stitches up the school counsellor using a mix of cajoling and threat he has not learned from Dussander but found in himself - does pose the truly terrifying question of what that kid is up to these days.
Credits
- Producers
- Jane Hamsher
- Don Murphy
- Bryan Singer
- Screenplay
- Brandon Boyce
- Based on the novella by Stephen King
- Director of Photography
- Newton Thomas Sigel
- Editor
- John Ottman
- Production Designer
- Richard Hoover
- Music
- John Ottman
- ©Phoenix Pictures Inc
- Production Companies
- Phoenix Pictures presents a Bad Hat Harry production
- In association with Canal+ D.A.
- Executive Producer
- Tim Harbert
- Co-producer
- Thomas DeSanto
- Associate Producers
- John Ottman
- Jay Shapiro
- Production Co-ordinator
- Jo Jo Leachman McIllece
- Unit Production Manager
- Tim Harbert
- Location Manager
- Julie Duvic
- Post-production
- Supervisor:
- Hilarie Roope Benz
- Office Co-ordinator:
- Shannon O'Bryan
- Assistant Directors
- Fernando Altschul
- Kelly A. Kiernan
- Robert A. Neft
- Script Supervisor
- Mellanie Bradfield
- Casting
- Francine Maisler
- Associate:
- Kathryn Eisenstein
- Voice:
- Barbara Harris
- Camera Operator
- Jonathan W. Brown
- Digital Effects
- Digiscope
- Special Effects
- Supervisor:
- Philip Beck Jr
- Technicians:
- Chris Ward
- Ron Petruccione
- Associate Editor
- Roger Fenton
- Art Director
- Kathleen M. McKernin
- Set Designers
- Amy Shock
- David Eckert
- Set Decorator
- Jennifer Herwitt
- Storyboard Artist
- John Coven
- Costume Designer
- Louise Mingenbach
- Make-up Supervisor/Designer
- Daniel Parker
- Key Make-up Artist
- Joni Meers Powell
- Key Hairstylist
- Edward St. George
- Titles/Opticals
- Cinema Research Corporation
- Conductor
- Larry Groupé
- Orchestrations
- Larry Groupé
- John Ottman
- Frank Macchia
- Music Supervisor
- Lia Vollack
- Music Editors
- Amanda Goodpaster
- Lia Vollack
- Music Recordist/Mixer
- Tim Boyle
- Recordist
- Charlie Bouis
- Soundtrack
- "Tristan und Isolde" by Richard Wagner, performed by Carlos Kleiber and The Bayreuth Festival Orchestra; "Too Much of Nothing" by Paul Nelson, Sue Fink, Carl Verheyen, performed by Dante Marchi; "Tony's Analysis" by Van Alexander; "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)" by Jay Livingston, Ray Evans, performed by Ian McKellen; "Das ist Berlin" by Leo Leux, Matthias Perl, Hans Hannes, Bruno Balz, performed by Liane & The Boheme Bar Trio; "Prelude and Liebestod" from "Tristan und Isolde" by Richard Wagner, performed by Charles Munch and The Boston Symphony Orchestra
- Sound Mixer
- Geoffrey Lucius Patterson
- Re-recording Mixers
- Robert J. Litt
- Elliot Tyson
- Michael Herbick
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Chuck Michael
- Sound Editors
- Simon Coke
- Michael Haight
- Nash Michael
- Rodger Pardee
- ADR
- Supervisor:
- George Berndt
- Recordist:
- Rick Canelli
- Mixer:
- Thomas J. O'Connell
- Foley
- Artists:
- Dan O'Connell
- John Cucci
- Recordist:
- Linda Lew
- Mixer:
- Jim Ashwill
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Gary Jensen
- Animal Wranglers
- Steve Martin's Working Wildlife
- Lundin Farm
- Worldwide Movie Animals
- Cast
- Ian McKellen
- Kurt Dussander
- Brad Renfro
- Todd Bowden
- Bruce Davison
- Richard Bowden
- Elias Koteas
- Archie
- Joe Morton
- Dan Richler
- Jan Triska
- Isaac Weiskopf
- Michael Byrne
- Ben Kramer
- Heather McComb
- Becky Trask
- Ann Dowd
- Monica Bowden
- Joshua Jackson
- Joey
- David Schwimmer
- Edward French
- Mickey Cottrell
- sociology teacher
- Michael Reid MacKay
- James Karen
- nightmare victims
- Marjorie Lovett
- Agnes Bowden
- David Cooley
- gym teacher
- Blake Anthony Tibbetts
- teammate
- Katherine Malone
- student
- Grace Sinden
- secretary
- Anthony Moore
- umpire
- Kevin Spirtas
- paramedic
- Danna Dennis
- nurse
- Michael Artura
- Detective Getty
- Donna Marie Brown
- mother
- Mark Flythe
- Darren
- Warren Wilson
- newscaster
- Jill Harris
- reporter
- Norbert D. Singer
- Mildred Singer
- hospital administrators
- Mary Ottman
- doctor
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- Columbia Tristar Films (UK)
- 9,995 feet
- 111 minutes 3 seconds
- Dolby/SDDS
- Colour by
- Technicolor
- Anamorphic [Panavision]