Young Bodies Heal Quickly | Review

Youth in Revolt: Betzer’s Inexplicable Road Movie an Assortment of Prominent Instances

Director Andrew T. Betzer manages to concoct an impressively pronounced feature debut with the eerily titled Young Bodies Heal Quickly. Basically a meandering road movie about two brothers on the lam, their journey churns from magnetic portrayal of familial discord into disjointed episodes of increasingly surreal occurrences. Though Betzer’s refusal to adhere to any kind of cohesive narrative for his youthful protagonists eventually dampens the effectiveness of the film as it stumbles into its ambiguous finale, the film manages to be intriguing and unpredictable as a balancing act that is sometimes funny, observational, and even foreboding.

If their bodies heal quickly, we’re never certain of their psychological states, though both Older (Gabriel Croft) and Younger (Hale Lytle) may as well represent developmental, identity-less stages or echoes of inevitability (the figure known as Dad could just as well be known as Oldest). Like Belgian director Fien Troche’s Kid, in which its eponymous child protagonist’s character name works doubly as a descriptive noun, these are children stripped of definition, at the mercy of the law and their elders. In its first half, Betzer continually surprises, even if it would have helped to clearly define certain aspects of the boys’ existence. For instance, it isn’t all that apparent that Older has recently been released from some kind of juvenile facility, calling his younger brother out of the bushes while they aggressively bash an abandoned car in with a baseball bat and shoot at farm animals with a BB gun. They spy two girls riding around on ATVs, and when the Older shoots one, they retaliate. As the young women beat up on his older brother, the younger one bashes a girl in the head. She collapses. They run.

After the constable visits their mother (Sandra L. Hale), she takes her sons to a motel, gives them some necessary belongings, feeds them, cuts their hair, and then sends them off in a car. The first stop happens to be at the isolated residence of an estranged older sister (Kate Lyn Sheil). Her barely disguised contempt for the elder brother finds them in comic discord and she soon kicks them out. Next, they’re saved by a French maid (Julie Sokolowski) at a seaside resort. But it soon becomes clear she just means to use the elder to make her boyfriend angry. And then, apparently by accident, they stumble upon the property of some rich folks we assume to be vacationing. They run into their much older father (Daniel P. Jones) and he takes them off into a reenactment of the Vietnam War that looks a lot like paintball, dressing his sons up as Viet Cong.

After the boys leave behind the French gal and her dysfunctional relationship, Betzer’s film begins to feel a bit less satisfying. The insistently vague family dynamics gives the relationship with their father a rather unmoored, surreal quality, as if they’d fallen asleep and we’ve followed them into a dreamscape, somehow finding the long lost refuge they’d been aimlessly seeking.

Some arresting work from DoP Sean Price Williams, who regularly works with Alex Ross Perry (not to mention some superb work on The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga and Heaven Knows What), adds to the success of Young Bodies Heal Quickly, capturing a finicky warmth in the exchange between a mother and her sons as she sends them away, or the blazing lights from the emergency flares the older brother lights off providing an ambience that’s as visually embracing as it is nearly redolent of lazy, lost summers.