“BOY” HAS WISTFUL WISDOM

“BOY” HAS WISTFUL WISDOM

We are born alone and we die alone, and then there is adolescence. “Boy,” now playing at the Loft Cinema, 3233 E. Speedway Blvd., explores this early teen time, when everyone is unknowingly influenced by unseen forces out there in the world.

A stranger speaks roughly in some public place when the kid is alone. Another stranger is more kindly and understanding. These are just ordinary moments competing for attention.

They don’t register in the youngster’s immediate memory bank, but to the growing child they become telltale signs of what the adult world is really like. Over time these unadulterated experiences accumulate, changing the questioning youngster into the bitter teen, and no one knows exactly how such an unfortunate thing could have happened.

“Boy,” from New Zealand entertainer, writer and director Taika Waititi, implies a lot of these behavioral developments in its surface tale of a 10-year-old boy from a broken home. A lot of the incidents are humorously embarrassing as Boy (James Rolleston with a radiant smile) makes his way through the rough-and-tumble rural manners of 1984 on a rundown farm outside a village near the Bay of Plenty.

Boy is the oldest in a parentless family of six, growing up without any idea what he is supposed to be growing up to be. Boy’s mother died during the birth of a sibling. Boy’s father (unknown to Boy) has been in prison the past several years.

Boy’s father is Alamein (Waititi), who shows up at this ramshackle farm just as the family’s grandmother must motor off for a week to attend a distant funeral. Obliquely we learn Alamein has buried quite a large sum of money several years earlier in a grassy field near the house. But he has no idea where, so the kids must help him keep digging holes.

The casually paced plot strings together this search along with sequences of Boy with his school pals trying to solve the mystery of girls; Alamein with his two clueless mates more interested in staying stoned; Alamein with Boy, who blindly adores his dad even though we can clearly see the man is totally undeserving of such total loyalty.

Waititi the writer isn’t interested in happy endings or morally uplifting lessons about life. What we get, instead, is gritty humor that reminds us how every day has the potential to become a life-changing opportunity. And every day also can bring fresh chances that we simply never see.