A Boy Called Sailboat (2018)

[Edgy MD]

In an un-named town somewhere in the Southwest, an extended drought has gutted the population, and those left behind are stuck in an eroding culture of closed downtown shops, high-attrition schools, and used car lots with only three cars for sale. In a shack that's so ramshackle that it is precariously propped up by a single supporting beam, José y Meyo raise their oddball son Sailboat.



As insecurely as the prop holds the house erect, each of the family members are barely sustained by an eccentric fixation José (Noel Guglielmi, who you'll recognize as a convict from 100 prison movies) is fascinated by images horses, which he continuously renders with his paint-by-numbers kits. Meyo is a sociophobe whose main connection with the world is cooking spicey meatballs. (I shit you not.) And young Sailboat, you may have guessed, is obsessed with sailboats, despite living in a town where nobody has even seen the sea.



The little boy finds a ukulele and writes an allegedly magical song. An overplayed, stilted Wes Anderson-type style intersects with Southwestern magic realism, and stuff happens.



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[Edgy MD]

Yeah, this was OK for a debut, but by most other standards, it contained big holes. The most glaring was this absence of this magical song.



In films about prodigious writing, this copout often occurs. A young writer begins reading from something they wrote, and the sound fades after a sentence or two, and they montage the audience raptured by this young genius, but what's glaringly obvious is we're not hearing this great work, because the screenwriter isn't capable of writing something so brilliant on the face of it.



So it goes with A Boy Called Sailboat. He begins his song and what sounds like the old "Emergency Broadcast Test" tone plays while we watch the transfixed listeners, stunned by it's beauty, putting aside old grudges, giving up their sinful ways, reconciling. You can play this sort of magic in earnest or you can play it for laughs, but give us some of that song so we can feel a little blessed too.



No such luck.