I Finally Saw "Detainment!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

                                I had wanted to see this film, from the time I first heard about it, last year.  I had my chances in theaters New York, but never seemed to have the time avail myself of a viewing.  Or so I kept telling myself.

                                 Because this film deals with the murder of a two year old toddler, James Bulger.

                                  For those who may not know, James was abducted from the Strand Mall in Liverpool, on February 12, 1993, just within a month of his 3rd birthday.  He would be 29 years old today.

                                   He was abducted from the mall by two ten-year-old boys, Robert Thompson, and Jon Venables.  They were playing hooky from school, shoplifting, and allegedly came up with the idea of killing a child,  They reached out to abduct a little girl, but she escaped in time.  James was found outside the store, where his mother was paying for merchandise.  He had wandered off, and before his mother realized, it he was gone.

                                       The two traipsed about the city with James.  People saw the boys with him, and tried to intervene, but nothing seemed to assure them the child was in danger.  But he was.

                                        Thompson and Venables took James to a canal, contemplating pushing him in.  They ended up by a railroad track, where they threw stones at the baby, threw paint in his eyes, beat him over the head, tampered with him sexually, and left him for dead, until he was run over, and cut in half, by a train.

                                           Fortunately, for the film, the crime is not portrayed at all as graphically as I described.  Had it been, I would have stopped watching.  I discovered this film, by the way, by accident, on You Tube, and viewed it last night.

                                             There is no question the film is hard to watch.  I am not sure I could watch it a second time.  But several things make it especially fascinating and illuminating.

                                                First, the performances by the actors, especially Ely Sloan as Jon Venables, Leon Hughes as Robert Thompson, Caleb Mason as James Bulger, and Tara Breathnach and Killian Sheridan, as Veables' parents, Susan and Neil.

                                 Even without graphics, what each actor is forced to enact is so horrifying,  I worried for the young actors in it.   What is fascinating about the boys' performances, is, while Hughes, as Thompson, comes off as the more dangerous one, it is the angelic, emotional portrayal of Venables  by Sloan, that made me see him, as I always thought, as the more calculating, sociopathic, and dangerous one of the two.   Within the film, which is an interrogation of them, based on transcripts, the audience knows what they have done, but I have no doubt, from the film, that the boys knew too.  The real horror, for me, were the tears and looks on the Venables' faces, when they understood, and believed, what their son and his friend had done.  The father was ready to write off his son, at that point, and, frankly, I would not have blamed him.  And with what is known about the adult Venables, it stands he is the more dangerous of the two.

                                                    There is this beautiful, poetic shot, almost an outtake from "The Sound Of Music," of the boys waking on a grassy knoll againt a blue, white clouded sky, with James.  The image is stunning and beautiful, but becomes tainted as the viewer' mind is detracted from the shot, to the truth behind what is actually going on here.

                                                        I am glad I saw "Detainment," though it does not change my opinion of those killers, who are still out there, and still should not be.  The film ends with a written word stating these boys are the two youngest killers of the twentieth century.

                                                          I understand Denise Bulger's anger. And I share her concern over the child playing James--what it does to her, what it could do to him.  But I don't think the film humanizes the boys, not at all.

                                                            It just clarifies, for viewers, the monsters they actually were and still are!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                                              God bless you, James!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!