Mark Reviews Movies: GULLY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 3, 2021

There's an undeniable degree of honesty in Gully, which follows three teenagers, living in an impoverished part of Los Angeles, as they confront and evade their trauma. It's always there with them, lingering and inescapable, and if that's to be the truth of their lives, what real purpose will and could their lives actually serve?

That's the central question of screenwriter Marcus J. Guillory and director Nabil Elderkin's movie, and most of the answers here aren't pleasant. The three boys waste their potential—avoiding school and living out violent fantasies via video games—and make decisions that will change the rest of their lives—a girlfriend is pregnant—and retreat from any talk about who they are, how they ended up here, and what their futures might be. All of this comes before they decide to live out those brutal fantasies in the real world.

That development, along with some distracting stylistic flourishes on the part of the director (who's making his narrative feature debut), puts this story into a strange context, which distances us from these characters. That's partially the intention, since these teens have become distanced from the world, their sense of self, and the consequences of their actions, but it's also a major misstep on Elderkin's part.

This isn't just some modern morality play or reality-based nightmare about the extremes of young people feeling isolated, lost, and as if they have nothing to lose. It's also meant to make us understand and even sympathize with these characters, who have felt this way for a long time and for reasons beyond their control. When they try to take back some kind of control, it's almost inevitable that the means will be violent. Violence is, after all, everything they have learned, witnessed, and been told to replicate.

There's a certain tragedy to this tale, and it's obvious that Guillory and Elderkin both see it that way. The filmmakers even include a character who's part prophet and part chorus in a Greek tragedy. He sees and seems to know or intuit all. When the story ends for one character, the chorus can do nothing but wail—bemoaning how fate has brought that character to this place and hope that there's something beyond the sky for him.

The point of describing all of this is that the movie is a jumble of ideas and forms. At their best, Elderkin's ambitions are admirable. At their worst, the director's showy displays keep the material from finding any kind of grounding. The result isn't quite a mess, although it often feels like one, but it definitely fails to resonate in the way Guillory and Elderkin believe it will.

The three teenage boys are Jesse (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), Calvin (Jacob Latimore), and Nicky (Charlie Plummer). Jesse doesn't speak, although he does provide some philosophical voice-over narration to accompany the events of the story. His first nugget of wisdom comes from a lesson his mother taught him: Pain is like treasure, and it should only be shared with one's friends. Life, the boy ponders, taught him another lesson: There's some treasure that must remain buried.

That's basically the story for each of these teens. Jesse's buried pain becomes key, as flashbacks reveal a trip to the laundromat with his mother. He, a Black young man, currently lives with a white man named Charlie (John Corbett), who seems to be the boy's guardian. The truth of all of that is devastating, as is the way Elderkin has a witness to the events of the laundromat standing behind Jesse—as if the boy is stuck in that moment, no matter where he may be.

Calvin dreams of going to Venus one day. His mother (played by Robin Givens) tries to prevent her son from skipping school, but the teen keeps playing hokey and remembers a talk with his father (played by DeRay Davis)—minutes before a fatal encounter with the police.

Nicky is already father-to-be, and his relatively younger mother (played by Amber Heard) is rarely around. His father is never around, because Nicky can recall watching his dad pummel a man's skull with a baseball bat.

A couple of other characters include Greg (Jonathan Majors), who has been released on parole after killing someone in a fight and is working hard to get his life in order, and a homeless man (played by Terrence Howard), who serves as the aforementioned prophet/chorus. All of these and more lives and stories kind of intersect, as, one day, the three friends, playing a violent video game, decide to "take the game outside."

They imagine themselves, like in a video game, selecting weapons and "upgrading" vehicles over the course of a couple-day crime spree. During the downtime, they also try to figure out what to do about Jesse's situation.

There's a sense of chaotic urgency to the spree, which tells us one thing about how we're supposed to feel about these characters, but the in-between scenes return to that quieter, introspective tone, which tells us something completely different. The point of Gully becomes lost in this tonal and stylistic whiplash, which puts the movie's showiness over the painful truths at its core.

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