GLENN KENNY'S MOVIE REVIEW (posted 5/2/06)

In the interests, as they say, of full disclosure, I'm obliged to note that between the time a longer version of this film screened at Cannes last year and the acquisition of the picture in a tighter (and to my mind, much improved) version by ThinkFilm, I had several exchanges with its lead actor and coproducer Edward Norton about the picture, and I lent it a form of support as it was shopped around. Now that that's out of the way, I do think that Down in the Valley, written and directed by David Jacobson, is a poetic, moving picture about growing up absurd in southern California, a picture in the tradition today's younger cineasts would argue was forged by the likes of Malick, Altman, and Ashby. Norton plays Harlan, a seemingly sincere young hayseed, who moves into the life of Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood), a good kid, albeit a bit of a natural rebel, who's growing increasingly restless under the gaze of her flinty single dad (David Morse) and increasingly exhausted by the peculiar emotional demands of her younger brother Lonnie (Rory Culkin). The sweetness of the Harlan-Tobe romance takes a new flavor after we find out that Harlan's not who he appears to be; the story turns most upsetting, but never loses its focus on the essential loneliness of all its characters.

As great as the entire cast is, the movie belongs to Wood, who creates a unique portrait of a girl hesitating at the threshold of womanhood; she's smarter, more attuned, and more spiritually ambitious than those around her, but also too decent and loyal to break from the world she knows—and too unformed to have a grasp of what she wants outside of that world. It's fantastic work. —Glenn Kenny