Hide Your Smiling Faces, 2013
Directed by Daniel Patrick Carbone
Starring Ryan Jones, Nathan Varnson, Colm O’Leary, Thomas Cruz, Christina Starbuck and Chris Kies
SYNOPSIS:
After a neighborhood tragedy, two adolescent brothers confront changing relationships, the mystery of nature, and their own mortality. Hide Your Smiling Faces is an atmospheric exploration of rural American life through the often distorted lens of youth.
Telling the most low-key story of two young boys dealing with a tragic death in their small town, Hide Your Smiling Faces is an art film with a capital ‘A’. It’s low on story and heavy in tone, but it’s also very dull and dreary.
Despite having a run time of 81 minutes, Hide Your Smiling Faces drags its heels through each scene and ends up feeling longer than the near-three-hour Transformers: Age of Extinction. Debut director Daniel Patrick Carbone has carved a slice of real-life with nothing in the movie feeling false or contrived and he deserves a huge amount of credit for it. Like real-life, Hide Your Smiling Faces is slow, mundane and lacking in drama at every turn.
The problem is that Hide Your Smiling Faces is too slow and too mundane and the lack of drama means nothing happens over the 81-minutes. Quite literally nothing. The boys don’t grow from this tragic death that has cast a gloomy shadow over the town, their decisions and actions never have any resolutions and you’re left in the same position as the credits close as you were when they began. Creating an art movie is one thing, but making an interesting art film with something to say is entirely different. This is where Hide Your Smiling Faces fails.
There are a couple of shining lights however in the form of lead actors Ryan Jones and Nathan Varney, who both give natural and beautiful performances. For a couple of first-time screen actors, the pair do a marvellous job and echo the aura and mood that Carbone is trying to reflect. The rest of the actors in Hide Your Smiling Faces do adequate and necessary jobs, but its Jones and Varney who steal the show. Their brotherly relationship feels real and incredibly convincing.
But Hide Your Smiling Faces just can’t escape the feeling of being pointless. It has themes of death which are prevalent throughout the movie and cinema snobs will love its indie sensibilities, but there is little to really say about it. Aside from some good central performances, there is literally nothing in Hide Your Smiling Faces to write home about. This kind of adolescent coming-of-age story has been done a lot better in the last year with the terrific Mud and average Kings of Summer and Hide Your Smiling Faces offers little to compete against them. It’s as dull as the washed out camera filters applied to every shot and a bit of a bore.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★
Stephen Flanagan
Originally published August 1, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
