By: debbie lynn elias
It’s long been said that you never know from where your next great idea may come. This is particularly true for Jennifer Venditti who makes her directorial debut at LAFF with her documentary portrait of BILLY THE KID. On location at a high school in rural Maine casting teens as extras for Carter Smith’s short film “Bugcrush”, Jennifer stumbled on to Billy Price.
Sitting in observance for several days, Jennifer took note of the various cliques of personalities that permeated the school cafeteria and noted that rarely, if ever, would the twains meet, mix or mingle. (I seriously doubt things were different in her own high school days. I know it was the same in mine.) But when they did, it was with cruelty and intentional meanness that the Goliaths would pick on the Davids. This is how Jennifer found Billy. Himself sitting in solitude, the day came when Billy became the victim of some jibs and jabs. A slightly odd boy described by his teachers as having “emotional disability” and to handle with “extreme caution” and his need for a “special learning environment”, Jennifer watched Billy adversely and uniquely react to the situation and became engrossed in his persona and did, in fact, cast him in “Bugcrush.”
But even after wrapping her work on “Bugcrush”, Jennifer couldn’t get Billy out of her mind. This obsession compelled her to go back to the school and get her own footage of Billy and thus, BILLY THE KID was born.
Shot over the course of 8 days in the life of Billy we are privy to a few of the thoughts and actions of a most unique individual. On many levels, Billy appears to be your run-of-the-mill average teen filled with the angst of acne, puppy love and peer pressure who happens to love heavy metal, karate and comic and film action heroes. On another level, Billy is more insightful and profound than his contemporaries, a fact in and of itself that makes Billy an “outsider”. And on yet another level, he struggles with forms of emotional and learning dysfunction, at times so severe that even his mother has been injured by him when, as an infant, he punched her face while she was trying to restrain him during a fit of anger. A Special Ed student, with eyes flittering his attention everywhere but at the task at hand, his movements are notably deliberate particularly in his lumbering walk, and you can sense a frustration and “boiling point” struggling to be contained. He outwardly disregards his differences and rationalizes it as “I’m not black, I’m not white, not foreign…just different in the mind – different brains, that’s all” yet the more you listen to him, the more you hear his tacit plea for acceptance.
Thanks to effective use of vignettes, we meet Billy as he goes through his daily routine wired with a microphone and a camera following him at all times. Interspersed with day-to-day events are some evocative and telling interviews with teachers, friends and family, most notably his mother who is depicted as Billy’s best friend, confidant and ally. Yet, one gleans more from what is not said or what is side-stepped rather than direct statements made with rationalization at times replacing fact. His mother tries to explain some of Billy’s difficulties and perceptions as being due to an absent crackhead father but it never seems quite convincing enough and sounds like a place to lay blame anywhere but here and now, and in the long run, I believe does a disservice to Billy in that his true difficulties are not being addressed nor are they ever explained to the audience.
Joyous when he brags about his purple belt in karate, Billy’s chest swells with pride when wearing his gi (karate uniform), although despite his self-professed acumen with the sport and its rituals, improperly walks around town and goes into stores and restaurants wearing it. When not in his gi, Billy’s mainstay attire is 80’s heavy metal t-shirts which he uses as conversation pieces when meeting people, displaying his knowledge (often to annoyance) of a particular band. And again, thanks to the intimate lensing, you can feel his need to belong and be liked.
Perhaps the most affecting moments come with Billy’s first love – Heather. With the same shyness and trepidation that we have all felt at some point in our lives, you feel your heart soar with him as he gets his first kiss (for which he went and hid behind a building with no camera yet being wired, we hear the kiss and Heather’s adorable giggle) and earns the applause of some adult townspeople. But, as quickly as his romance blossoms, it dies. We see it coming. We know the pitfalls. We know the error in his rushing ways. His mother sees it too, but pussyfoots around when trying to talk to Billy about Heather and relationships in general. And after the heartache, the cameras capture some of his inner rage as well.
After an initial shoot of some 4 or 5 days, Vendetti returned to Maine to catch up with Billy and find him on stage with the school choir as a soloist during the Christmas chorale. Beaming from ear to ear, joking with friends, with family in the audience and accolades of applause ringing in his ears, the Billy we see is a bit more confident and at ease. It makes one want to know what happened in the months between the two shoots or if those scant days of shooting were not a true exemplar of who Billy truly is.
The first 15 minutes of the film are exemplary. An interesting subject – Billy. Perfect set-ups. A loving mother. A devoted son. The bar is set for your expectations of the film. But despite this effort by Jennifer Venditti, BILLY THE KID falls a bit short – especially when viewed in light of its competition in the Documentary Category. In a prior interview Venditti stated that she chose Billy and particularly this extended project so he could “stick it” to those that have laughed at him over the years. She feels an “uncomplicated appreciation and empathy” for him. Sadly, with the representations shown here, that rationale may backfire and only add fuel to the fodder of his peers. Billy himself has often said, “Sometimes the imaginative world’s much better than the real world, but there’s one difference: Imagination ain’t real!” That is so true. But first you have to accept the real world in order to make the imaginary become real.
An entry in the Documentary Competition, BILLY THE KID screens Sunday, June 24, at 7:00 p.m. at the Landmark Regent and Thursday, June 28 at 5:00 p.m. at The Landmark.
