Terri Movie Review

We’ve all been through high school. Some of us have seen movies about those trying days and read novels like “Catcher in the Rye.” We gather from the media that high school kids break themselves up into cliques: the jocks, the Einsteins, the hot girls, the cool guys. But nobody wants to hear about the outcasts, the untouchables, those who are not brainy or athletic or cool or hot and therefore suffer on the margins of what could be some of the best times of their lives. “Terri” is about an outcast who is morbidly obese, and rather than do something about his physical problem, he simply decides to accept himself to such an extent that he wears pajamas to school because they’re comfortable. He has given up and no longer tries to gain the acceptance of others. Things change when the vice-principal takes an interest in him, scheduling him and others of that ilk or outright troublemakers for weekly sessions in his small office. The chats that Terri has with the adult, with this authority figure who, we find out later, has his own vulnerabilities, may not help him in high school or in life, but they make for some intriguing, if slow-moving comedy-drama.

The title role of the 15-year-old with the unfortunately androgynous name is played by Jacob Wysocki, twenty years old in real life. This is his breakthrough feature film, one which has promise of future casting in roles that call for obese men. The pace is slow, some would say tediously so, but there are rewards, and “Terri” serves as a movie that will find a particular audience among those who believe they could have done better in the social areas of high school, whether their deficiencies were due to their weight or to some aspect of personality.

Though Terri in introverted, he takes care of his uncle James (Creed Bratton), after presumably having been dumped into the older man’s care by Terri’s parents. James, for his part, treats the boy well but is even more fragile than Terri, an ailing fellow who takes a pharmacy’s worth of pills with the 15-year-old standing by to make sure he does so. When Terri has the fortune of making two friends from the school, the pretty Heather (Olivia Crocicchia) and Chad (Bridger Zadina), he becomes happier than he had been for a while, though one wonders whether the brief friendship would carry over into later life, getting Terri out of his shell. What is left unspoken in the movie is: What is the boy doing to shed that excess weight, which has been not only responsible for his being shunted aside by his classmates but will impinge on his health—if it has not already done so?

While Wysocki is in virtually every frame, far more than the more celebrated actor John C. Reilly in the role of Mr. Fitzgerald, the conferences between the school official and Terri are the anchor. Reilly, an accomplished comedian who could make people laugh by our simply looking at his expressions, plays vice principal in charge of discipline in a small-town California school. When he interviews a troublemaker, he speaks so loudly that the elderly secretary just aside revels in listening in, putting her ear to the window. This is what keeps her going, or so the vice principal imagines. But he’s all bluff, really, a man who is genuinely interested in the kids who are on the margins, even taking them on trips as when he grabs Terri and Chad to go to the funeral of the secretary as the woman had no friends or family.

Mr. Fitzgerald is the authority figure I wish I had and maybe you would too. As for Terri, he is at least noticed by a pretty girl, Heather, when Heather is blacklisted by the rest of the kids for performing a small sexual act during a Home Economics class. Given the bores that director Azazel Jacobs uses as teacher models—the home ec. woman, the home room teacher, the gym coach who throws Terri out because the boy would not perform the needed drills—who could blame Heather for looking for a moment of secret fun?

“Terri” scores despite its tendency to become tedious because it eschews the sit-com mood that other filmmakers might employ while humanizing a boy who is lucky to have made three friends in school.

Azazel Jacobs Doesn't Have to Be Cool Anymore

Sheepishly, obligingly, Azazel Jacobs trespasses into the apartment where he used to live. On Avenue A and 10th Street, above where the now-defunct Brownies used to showcase indie bands back when Jacobs was a postpunk post-grad, he pushes open an unlocked door and bounds up the steamy, unrenovated stairwell. He talks briefly of life here in the ’90s, but is not feeling very nostalgic—just as quickly as he entered the building, he’s back out and around the corner, onto something else.

Jacobs, whose new film Terri opens Friday, now lives in Los Angeles, but the director is still plainly a restless New Yorker from electric-socket-shocked-’fro to toe. And his latest proves how eager he is to grow up and away from what has defined him. “I’m not saying I’m winging it, but I’m constantly finding myself in places where I don’t know if I’m gonna pull it off,” he says. “And I love it, man.”

The world of Terri, his lovely and subtly harrowing portrait of a California misfit who doesn’t even try to fit in at high school, is a coast and millions of cultural miles away from Jacobs’s own cool-kid boho beginnings. He was immersed in the experimental films of dad Ken Jacobs, and at home in Manhattan’s artsy Bayard Rustin High. While his last film, Momma’s Man, was shot almost entirely in his parents’ eccentrically cluttered Chambers Street loft, and even co-starred his parents, the new one takes place in a nondescript suburban high school and features John C. Reilly. Though Jacobs has a more personal teenage tale to tell—something akin to Larry Clark’s Kids, he warns—with Terri he’s made a far rarer coming-of-age story that’s neither a primal scream nor a promotion of precociousness, but rather a work of knowing, matured empathy. “You just want to scoop the kids up and say, ‘It’s not gonna last, it’s gonna be all right.’ But that would be a lie,” he says. “That’s something my folks didn’t ever tell me. That it’s gonna be OK.”

“I had him pegged for an asshole,” Patrick deWitt tells me by telephone. Before novelist deWitt wrote the screenplay for Terri, he was wary of the transplanted downtown hipster who’d come talk to him as he tended bar at L.A.’s 3 Clubs. “There was a touch of the cock-of-the-walk about him,” he recalls. Plus there’s the art-punk look of him, with the kind of hair, threads, and piercings that suggest a forbidding LP collection. “He dresses sort of how I did when I was 16,” chides deWitt, pegging the 38-year-old as a Peter Pan in Clash concert tees and denim. Jacobs eventually proved deWitt a bad judge of character.

DeWitt showed Jacobs notes for a novel that ultimately became the basis for a stand-alone script. It started from his recollections of classmates who seemed completely guileless. “They had no cynicism or animosity with other kids,” he recalls. “And of course these were the kids who were often picked on the most.” Jacobs recalls the same, but from a different vantage. “I unfortunately see more of myself in the kids who torture Terri,” he admits, referencing characters in the film who callously pick on the big-boned protagonist’s weight and wardrobe. “I had a confused idea of what it meant to be a man, what it meant to be punk.”

While Jacobs wanted to summon the spirit of teen classics like Heathers and The Breakfast Club, movies that “make strong choices and all go to unexpected places,” it was deWitt’s penultimate sequence, a drunken, prescription-pill-addled night to remember between Terri and two friends, that ultimately convinced Jacobs that he had to make the film. “To see it unfold in this way—I hadn’t seen that in a movie before,” he says. “It was a place to go where I’d be completely on my own.”

The scene takes place in a work shed over a long Saturday night, presented in what seems like real-time, with one desperately impulsive act leading to another, the downhill slope of momentum getting steeper and steeper. It’s the memory of adolescence as a wild dance at the edge of disaster. “You don’t know what you’re going to do from one moment to the next. You’re like a spaniel, and whatever catches your interest you go toward that thing,” says deWitt. “And so often that thing is something really dangerous and bad for you.” But for Terri, the shed scene ends with a minor epiphany that looks major in adulthood’s rearview.

The situation calls to mind the last line of Jacobs’s Nobody Needs to Know (2003), a film that boldfaces the idealism and ambition the director now subtly smuggles into the subtext of a more mainstream movie. “One thing that I’m most afraid of,” says an unknown female voice, confessing via a disembodied answering machine, “is that somebody will catch me trying and failing.” After following characters in The Goodtimeskid and Momma’s Man who were similarly stalled, the cool-kid director finally locates a worthy, if seemingly unlikely, hero in the awkward, hulking Terri. Still stripping away ingrained expectations of cool, of growing up with the unique dilemma of never being as hardcore, never having as much artistic integrity, as his own father, he has found a kindred spirit in his adolescent opposite, a true outsider and outcast who can only but live on his own terms.

Terri Movie Review

With so many quirky coming-of-age movies out there, not only is establishing a unique and engaging lead character vital, but the same goes for the general tone of the film, too. While Terri does make use of some of the standard genre conventions, it packs so many innovative broad strokes and tiny details, it rises above the usual shtick, becoming something that makes an impact for all the right reasons.

Terri’s (Jacob Wysocki) got it rough; he’s an overweight teen who’s been abandoned by his parents, must take care of his ailing uncle (Creed Bratton) and is constantly picked on at school. When tardiness and his new wardrobe, consisting only of pajamas, land him in vice principal Fitzgerald’s (John C. Reilly) office, rather than suffer the consequences with a detention sentence, Terri actually makes a friend, Mr. Fitzgerald himself.

Thanks to his new relationship with Mr. Fitzgerald, Terri crosses paths with a couple other troubled souls, Chad (Bridger Zadina) and Heather (Olivia Crocicchia). Sure Chad is a bit off as he seemingly enjoys giving himself premature baldness and Heather is intensely promiscuous, but ultimately they’re quite similar to Terri in that they’re just trying to navigate through their adolescent period and emerge on the other side with some dignity.

As a character piece, it’s vital that Terri be an interesting person. He’s an overweight kid that wears pajamas, enjoys killing mice in his attic and eating beans on toast; how intriguing could he be? Oddly enough, those intimate quirks are presented in a way that pulls you in from the moment the film begins and never let go. At the start, Terri’s simply a kid that doesn’t do much. He seemingly has his routine and sticks to it. Still, his behavior is news to the audience and therefore, fresh and interesting. Then, just before you’re as bored by his routine as Terri, director and co-writer Azazel Jacobs offers up a curveball via Mr. Fitzgerald. From the moment Mr. Fitzgerald and Terri kick off their Monday morning meetings, Terri’s world is on the rocks and he becomes a far less predictable character. However, Jacobs keeps just enough of the character we first met intact to maintain that initial connection, making Terri’s change something we experience with him.

Mr. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, is a little bit too erratic. It’s made quite clear that while he appears to be the good guy, there’s something not quite right about him and, sure enough, he exhibits some incredibly unusual and often inappropriate behavior. Then again, he’s also capable of turning right back around to being Terri’s best friend and, as Terri’s quite likable, we want him to have that comfort. While there’s nothing wrong with a character that keeps you guessing, unlike with Terri, Mr. Fitzgerald’s motivations are never established quite clear enough to give the audience a firm grasp on who he really is. However, this is in no way a reflection of Reilly’s performance as he does make Mr. Fitzgerald feel like as much of a real person as possible.

As for Crocicchia and Zadina, both deserve praise for completely opposing styles of work. While Heather is far more calm and calculating, Chad is perpetually on edge and when he’s scheming, he takes pride in announcing it in the most obnoxious way possible. Through most of the film, Chad can be a bit too much and Heather not enough, but when the two come together with Terri in the final act of the film it all makes sense and they turn out to be the perfect complement to one another.

While this is a performance driven piece, Jacobs and his cinematographer, Tobias Datum, impart their own creativity knowing exactly what to do in order to enhance their cast’s work without being intrusive. There’s no showy camera work here, merely well-placed shots through which the audience can observe as though they’re standing right there alongside Terri. Even beyond the actors, the elements that the camera captures are clearly incredibly well planned down to the most minute of set pieces.

No, Terri isn’t perfect, but like the main character himself, the flaws are what give the piece character. The combination of likability and tragedy is magnetic, making Terri and his story incredibly engaging. It’s not something with some grand statement to make or even a film that’s wrapped up neatly and topped with a red ribbon for that matter. It’s just a simple slice of life that you’ll appreciate having experienced.

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