Radio

Review by: Alysa Salzberg
(AlysaSalzberg@TheCinemaSource.com)

As giving your mother a dead cat for an April Fool’s Day joke proves, the unexpected can be good, but it has to be done right.

I went to see Radio (directed by Michael Tollin) expecting...well, the expected. The movie tells the story of James Robert Kennedy (Cuba Gooding Jr.), who’s called Radio on account of his hobby of tinkering with old -- you guessed it – radios. Radio spends his days wandering around his South Carolina town, collecting things and putting them in a battered shopping cart he pushes before him. One day, his peaceful life changes forever when, seeing him hanging around the high school football fields, a group of model teenage athletes (I’m being sarcastic -- though some of these boys are so handsome they could literally be models) grab Radio, bind his limbs together with tape, and throw him into a shed. Radio’s life changes again when Coach Harold Jones (Ed Harris), head of the high school athletic department, spots what’s going on and sets Radio free. In that moment, a bond is formed between the two men, a bond that screenwriter Mike Rich treats with great subtlety. Does Coach Jones take Radio on as assistant coach, surrogate family member, and student, simply because he’s moved by the young man’s condition? Or is there more to the story? The answer, when it comes, is sobering.

Radio is based on a true story, and when you first hear about it, you might figure it’s also based on the standard formula for a feel-good movie that makes us laugh, cry, and have our frozen hearts warmed by the triumph of the human spirit, or some such thing. But the film doesn’t completely follow this formula.

Because normally in a flick about a great and unusual friendship, there’s something or someone there to challenge that friendship. For this role, Radio is as full of suspects as an Agatha Christie novel. Will Coach Jones’ neglected daughter do something to sabotage the men’s relationship in a fit of jealousy? Will Radio’s mother, in a desire to shelter him from the evils of the outside world, prohibit her son from spending time with Coach Jones? What about the beleaguered and not totally supportive school principal (Alfre Woodard)? Or the frustrated pretty-boy star football player? Or maybe the whole town will object to Radio’s easily misunderstood behavior.

But what Rich chooses to do is unusual: for a good part of the movie, there is no conflict like this. That’s to say, the film seems, curiously, to avoid it like the plague. Whenever one of the aforementioned issues came up, I tensed, waiting for the yelling and crying and betrayal to start. But like a showdown between a pair of guys too drunk to fight, potential confrontations in this movie died down almost as soon as they’d started. Radio progresses like most lives do, with a ...