Gardens of the Night

The synopsis provided by IMDB summarizes the film Gardens of the Night as, "An 8-year-old girl [who] is taken from her home and convinced that her family does not want her anymore. After enduring 9 years of horror, she and her fellow victim are dumped by their captures. Now, 17 years old and no one to turn to, except each other they do their best to survive life on the streets, until one day she finally accepts the help of a shelter counselor to find her way home. However, what she truly finds is the love of her life and that you can never go back."

Gardens of the Night is a film that captures the world of child abduction in an unsettlingly gritty and raw light. Tom Arnold, who plays the abductor, performs one of his most compelling acting jobs in his comedy-fluttered career. I must say his spot-on performance is commendable for all its cringe-worthiness. In the end Arnold became what the popular majority would assume a child abductor looked like but despite his conventionality he never became an imitator instead he created is own persona. 15 minutes into the film I had to stop watching. Its subject matter was that intense for me. And the director, Damian Harris, does an excellent job of capturing the subtleties and making them obvious in a subtle way. You become an investigator for the victim hoping to find the next trap before she does in the hopes of preventing her from being harmed. Your become completely submersed in this up-side down world.

It's always hard to tell who the breakthrough actor is, in intense characterizations like these. Arnold's perfectly formulated and yet effortlessly delivered performance, he manages not to out shine the child victim, Leslie who is played by Ryan Simpkins. Ryan's compelling eyes make the character's emotions intense and deep yet ambiguous in the end because unless she's outwardly crying her glossy eye's just manage to observe and nothing more. It becomes the job of the viewer to attribute an emotion to the intensity of her ambiguity. Her overall acting isn't always ambiguous though. She conveys the necessary emotion when it is completely appropriate and necessary. Her eyes also provide a much-needed innocence to the character. Her eyes have the ability to connote submission and fear at the same time and it becomes ever so appropriate for the situations in which the character finds her self. After watching her performance I feel that Simpkins has a great future ahead of her. If she was only 11 at the time of the film's release, I can only imagine how much more refined her acting chops will be as an adult.

Harris's directorial style is very supportive to the film in its entirety. He, as I said before, makes the subtle obvious in a subtle way. Meaning he might shoot "Leslie's" shoes in a scene where it is not relevant yet is used to remind the viewer of her innocence as a child. He includes very ironic elements in his writing, most notably in the “caterpillar to butterfly” analogy. He uses the score appropriately, although I can’t say I’m a fan of the actual musical quality of the score. Its conventional at times. The high pitched piano tones do help remind the viewer of the dichotomy between innocence and total perversion. A specific scene I can remember that was especially perturbing was a scene when the cops are after Arnold’s character and his accomplice and him begin to sing a cheerful song to the kids while fleeing the sight. In the scene the imagery is intense in that the children have bandanas strapped around their mouths and despite their efforts the children manage to only make muffled yells in all their horror. This frantically sung song accompanies this haunting imagery and the opposition between sight imagery and sound imagery is completely disturbing. It is a style use that can be compared to the rape scene in A Clockwork Orange, when they sang “Singing in the Rain.”

Lets not forget this film may have been great on an artistic and technical level. But the subject matter was unbearable at times. In what can really only be considered the rape/sex scene that we never see, the aftermath is disgustingly gripping. Arnold's character tries to convince Simpkins's character that she is a new person after enduring what she did and it is fucked up. There's no way around that. This girl is sold to multiple men who all manipulate her differently and I can almost consider their manipulation worse than their physical harm but that's just a personal conviction. That's not even the half of it. The head petting was probably the worst for me to see. I had to watch the film in MULTIPLE increments because it was too hard to see in one shot. You might think it won't go there but just like degrassi; it goes there.

In the end, yes the film is a performance driven film, but the subject matter never became something we've seen before. And that's another thing that’s important thing to recognize; the film deals with subject matter we may believe to have seen before in "the movies," but the truth is we haven't. There has never been quite a stirring rendition of child abduction like this one. This is not a heist movie, this is not slasher film and we're not seeing it through the eyes of the parents.. Ultimately it becomes a documentary of sorts. This assertion is supported by how well researched the film is. Writer/director, Damian Harris based his story on the kids, counselors, cops and pimps he met during two years of research, and it definitely shows. We are introduced into a world that's kept behind closed doors and in police files.

The stirring emotionally complex dénouement does well, in dealing with the reality of victims who grow up. We see Leslie struggle as a teenage prostitute and Donnie her “brother” as an illiterate who both are homeless on the streets of San Diego. After going to a shelter it is revealed to Leslie that her parents are alive and have been looking for her all those years. Harris does well in showing that an encounter after so long is awkward and he made it feel with out closure, which maintains a necessary authenticity to the story. A new soundtrack instead of score is more prevalent in the second half of the film and flash backs to the first half create a cyclical feeling that evokes strong emotion of bitter nostalgia. In the end Harris has created a film and story about what truly defines family and to what extent do the demons from our past determine our future. When do we truly become butterflies?