THE STORY – When his parents, Scott and Teresa, learn that Austin is both autistic and has brittle bone disease, they initially worry for their son’s future. But with Scott’s growing faith and Austin’s incredible spirit, they become “unbreakable,” finding joy, gratitude, and courage even in the most trying times
THE CAST – Zachary Levi, Meghann Fahy, Jacob Laval, Drew Powell & Patricia Heaton
THE TEAM – Jon Gunn (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 109 Minutes
A little movie about Scott (Zachary Levi) and Teresa (Meghann Fahy), two American kids growing up in the heartland. Scottie’s gonna be a rock-and-roll star but knocks Teresa up after their third date before he even knows her last name. Or that she’s already been divorced twice, or that her beautiful blue eyes that first attracted him to her are evidence of a condition called osteogenesis imperfecta, a.k.a. brittle bones syndrome, which just so happens to be genetic. Their first son, Austin (played by Jacob Laval for most of the film), inherits the genetic disorder from her, which Scott and Teresa think they can handle. However, he’s soon diagnosed with autism, which makes things much more difficult for them. Medical bills keep piling up, Austin’s middle school pushes him out to a “resource class,” separating the buoyant Austin from his peers and friends, and Scott turns to alcohol to cope. Will our two American kids be able to do the best they can and keep their family together?
You already know exactly what “The Unbreakable Boy” will be when you sit down to watch it, and it doesn’t disappoint. This is ersatz sentimental Americana at its most shamelessly emotionally manipulative, using the easiest emotional hook in the world – cute kids with debilitating diseases – to wring a few tears from its audience. Writer/Director Jon Gunn (“Ordinary Angels”) brings a level of polish to the film that keeps it from drowning in its melodrama, but his direction can’t elevate the Lifetime movie-level domestic drama of his screenplay. The film’s opening act is like an assault on the senses with hyperactive editing, voiceover narration that zooms through exposition, and childlike scribbles of certain important facts about the story and characters. It’s a lot, which makes sense, given that Austin is our narrator for most of the film.
However, this style is wholly abandoned before the film’s halfway point, settling down into a more toned-down, more comfortable adult register to match the film’s focus on Scott and Teresa. Unfortunately, that also means many generic scenes of domestic joys and disputes that only become interesting when Laval is onscreen. It feels a bit disingenuous for a film called “The Unbreakable Boy,” about a one-in-a-billion marvel of a kid, to spend more time with the boy’s parents than with him, but at least Gunn’s screenplay (based on the memoir written by the real-life Scott LeRette) gives him an omniscient narration that makes him a wise-beyond-his-years sage as well as an autistic teenage boy with a cool hat collection, so he does have a voice.
As the parents, Levi and Fahy have the unenviable task of grounding the story in deep, complex emotions that the screenplay tends to flatten. They manage to make every turn in the story feel real and full of emotion, but that often comes at the expense of subtlety. Even the moments where they try to bring a touch of subtle nuance to a scene end up feeling obvious and overblown due to the dialogue and directing. That’s par for the course for family films, but “The Unbreakable Boy” feels unbalanced because of it. The surface-level pleasures of the scenes focusing on Austin and his brother Logan (Gavin Warren) work due to the emphasis on children. Still, that same approach doesn’t always work in the scenes, focusing on the adults who play the material too broadly. Levi and Fahy are committed enough that the film is always watchable, but the blunt-force storytelling doesn’t allow them the space to grapple with everything the characters are experiencing. There are moments where it’s clear the film is trying to go for something deeper, but its inability to focus on more than one emotion or issue at a time cuts these moments off at the knees.
Gunn’s commitment to the film’s surface-level pleasures does at least mean that “The Unbreakable Boy” is a relatively harmless, easy watch. However, this also means it’s the type of film your grandparents would watch and call “a nice movie.” While the world as it stands right now could certainly use some more niceness, and the film is infused with Austin’s particular brand of joie de vivre, niceness alone isn’t enough to make it worthy of your time and money. Niceness often equates to a lack of depth and a refusal to truly engage with the material being presented, and that’s mostly true of “The Unbreakable Boy.” To the extent that it works, it’s due to Laval’s endearing charm as Austin and the overall glossy, unshowy cinematography by Kristopher Kimlin.
But focusing on the niceness of the LeRette family’s story does them a disservice. Scott and Teresa might be two American kids doing the best they can, but the cliché-ridden screenplay and surface-level direction make everything seem a lot easier than it must have been to live through it. Life isn’t a movie, but movies based on real lives shouldn’t shy away from the complexity and ugliness of the lives that inspire them; that’s not only what gives a story texture and depth, but it’s also what inspires people to take the lessons of a story and apply it to their own lives. It’s the difference between actually being inspirational and merely telling an “inspirational” story, and “The Unbreakable Boy” is sadly the latter.
