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New York Times
Hollow Reed
By Stephen Holden
Rigid and wide-eyed with terror, 9-year-old Oliver Wyatt (Sam Bould) steals into the recesses
of his mother's garage where he cowers in the darkness like a frightened animal, clutching his
injured hand, and waits for his mother to return home from work.
Oliver has just been brutally punished by Frank Donally (Jason Flemyng), his mother's
architect boyfriend, for some imaginary infraction. It's not the first serious injury Oliver
has suffered at Frank's hands, but the boy is scared to tell his mother that the man who has
made her so happy is responsible.
The scenes of this frightened child navigating through the house in which this abusive monster
could spring out at any second are among the most wrenching moments in Angela Pope's powerful
and unsettling film, "Hollow Reed." Adapted from a short story by Paula Milne, the British film
is a probing sociological tract fitted into the contours of a suspense thriller. Casting a cold
inquiring gaze on contemporary British attitudes toward divorce, child custody and
homosexuality, the film looks deeply into the network of troubled adult relationships
surrounding Oliver and finds a maelstrom of resentment and sorrow.
At the heart of the drama is a failed marriage fraught with extreme bitterness. Oliver's
parents, Martyn (Martin Donovan) and Hannah (Joely Richardson), have divorced after Martyn, a
family doctor who had been struggling to suppress his homosexuality, finally acknowledged his
orientation and left his wife for a male lover. Hannah, who also works in the medical
profession, has assumed custody of Oliver. She unabashedly hates her ex-husband, whose live-in
boyfriend, Tom (Ian Hart), works in a record store.
Whenever Oliver is hurt, he runs home to his father, who has been granted limited access to his
son. After the boy has suffered several mysterious "accidents" for which he invents
unsatisfying explanations, Martyn intuits that Frank is the culprit. And when Hannah
unexpectedly returns home and discovers her lover beating Oliver, she throws him out of the
house.
If the movie ended right here, it would be a pat little drama of child abuse, denial and
discovery. But Frank weeps and loves his way back into Hannah's good graces and vows never to
strike the boy again. A vicious child custody battle ensues in which Hannah and Frank unite
against Martyn, whose homosexuality is used against him in court interrogations that are
loaded with nasty insinuation. And in the film's ugliest scene, Frank takes Oliver aside and
poisonously tries to instill him with a fear and loathing of homosexuality. At the same time,
Martyn's and Tom's edgy relationship is severely tested.
"Hollow Reed" makes no bones about whose side it is on. Martyn is a gentle, caring father who,
although far from comfortable living as an openly gay man, stands up for the truth no matter
how personally embarrassing. Hannah may be a loving mother, but her decision to lie in court
about Frank's behavior is an unforgivable betrayal of her son.
The exceptional performances go a long way toward shading characters who might easily have been
painted in black- and- white. Donovan gives Martyn an anguished perplexity and stubbornness that
is not altogether heroic, while Flemyng reveals the frightened little boy (who was abused by his
own father) inside the macho man. Hart's tartly fiery Tom has no patience for Martyn's initial
impulse to try to conceal their relationship. Ms. Richardson delivers a compellingly scary
portrait of a determined woman driven by revenge and her own sexual needs to do the wrong thing.
If "Hollow Reed" is a little too schematic and builds to a clumsy soap-opera finale on Hannah's
front lawn, it gets under the skins of its major characters in a way that movies seldom do. Long
after it's over, you will remember their hurts and worry about the damage done to the child
caught in the crossfire of their passions.
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