Morris from America

SCREENED AT THE 2016 CHICAGO CRITICS FILM FESTIVAL: Back in May, when I heard the plot of the opening night film of the 2016 Chicago Critics Film Festival, I had an immediate flashback to the summer of 2012, when I was chosen as one of four Chicago teenagers to represent the United States at the Giffoni Film Festival in Italy, the largest children's film festival in the world (around 3300 teenagers from 54 countries and 79 Italian towns come to it every year). Besides the fact that I had to stay with an Italian host family for a entire week (and nobody in the family spoke English), the most exciting and unusual part of this film festival was that they would only show movies during the day and then, in the afternoon and into the evening, it would just turn into a gigantic party with all these teenagers from all over the world picnicking and hanging out and dancing to (mostly American) pop music.

However, due to my shyness and antisocialness at the time, I would mostly sit on a pair of swings in a nearby park and occasionally interact with pretty Italian girls if they seemed interested in interacting with me. Anyway, my point is, I thought a lot about my own experience as a young American boy in Europe when watching Morris from America, and while I only stayed in Italy for a week and a half, there were still a lot of things that rang true.

Here's the set-up: Morris, a 13-year-old African-American boy, is living in Heidelberg, Germany, with his dad who's a soccer coach. Since Morris' mother died a long time ago and he's beginning to become more and more distant from his father, most of the time Morris just sits in his room listening to rap music and surfing the Internet. It isn't until Morris' German tutor, Inka, makes him sign up for a program at the local youth center that he actually begins to interact with other human beings his age. Unfortunately, though, most of these German youths taunt him for his weight and his skin color, and as a result, he retreats further into depression and loneliness until an attractive young lady named Katrin takes him under her wing and develops a friendship with him.

What follows is a light, sweet, and sometimes heartbreakingly honest coming-of-age story that hit me on a lot of very personal levels. First of all, I just want to point out one scene that pretty much sums up my entire experience in Italy four years ago: when Morris and Katrin first have an actual conversation (after he's been admiring her from afar for a while), the first thing that Katrin does if offer Morris a cigarette. Considering that this is exactly what happened at least three times during interactions with pretty teenage girls in Italy, I immediately knew that writer/director Chad Hartigan knew a lot about what he was writing.

And this continued throughout the entire film. Not one thing here felt dishonest. The German teenage characters never felt like caricatures. The situations were all believable. And, most of all, the beautifully understated performance from Markees Christmas adds a lot of depth to what Hartigan already had written on paper, adding certain awkward beats and body language to moments that ultimately do a lot to capture the alienation and loneliness that he feels and that I felt during my week-and-a-half in Europe. And Craig Robinson does remarkable work as Morris' father, having just right amount of humor and pathos to be a fun character while also grounding the film, particularly in one great scene late in the film when he's driving Morris back from someone's house in Frankfurt and he tells the story of how him and Morris' mother met. I'd like to think if this film had come out later in the year, Robinson could have had a shot a Best Supporting Actor nomination. I know that won't happen, but he does deserve it.

Although I will admit to being kind of a sucker for coming-of-age films (three of my favorite films from the past several years are The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Boyhood, and Brooklyn), I still think that Morris from America is a solid entry into the genre with great performances and a beautifully honest story. And while I didn't have the urge to engage in repeat viewings like I did those other films, I would nevertheless recommend this without reservations since this isn't the kind of film that will get much of a push from its studio but it's one that deserves to be seen. Oh, and you will immediately want to visit Europe afterward.