Luce (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) is at a constant war with himself, perpetually trying to figure out what other people are projecting onto him when they see him, instead of just living for himself. The movie Luce is in a similar tug of war. On the one end is an Asghar Farhadi type story that rivets and builds tension moment by moment leading to a devastating climax. On the other end? A Lifetime Original movie. Thankfully, despite the trashy Lifetime’s best efforts, Luce plays out like a captivating political thriller, building tension steadily while saying something important.
Luce is at war with himself because of his upbringing and current high school problems. The boy was pulled from a dark murky childhood in Eritrea by his adopted parents, Amy (Naomi Watts) and Peter (Tim Roth). After years of therapy, Luce appears to be a well adjusted, smart, and VERY charismatic senior with unlimited potential: everyone in the school loves him. Everyone, that is, except his history teacher, Harriet Wilson (Octavia Spencer). Wilson becomes suspicious of Luce after he writes a paper condoning murder and other atrocities to achieve what end you desire, and on that suspicion, searches his locker and finds some illegal fireworks. Concerned, she shows Amy the paper and fireworks, which makes her legislate some of the strange behavior her son has had in recent memory.
Luce’s screenplay appears to be beset by traps all around. It could so easily fall into a trap of excessive deception, shameless murdering, and manipulative melodrama. JC Lee, the screenwriter avoids these pitfalls by building the story around something important: identity and projection. Each person in Luce is trying to fit the person they’re talking to into a box of some kind. Amy sees Luce as a combination of her life’s selfless work and the hope for a generation of kids. Harriet on the other hand? She is making sure that beacon of hope isn’t hiding any awful rotten secrets that society will exploit…because she is projecting her own life’s experiences onto Luce. When new revelations come to light based on new information, all of these characters have a personal decision to make: either throw out their previously laid beliefs about a person and start over, or manipulate the information to fix into the story you’ve built. This internal struggle provides the base for Lee’s characters, providing each actor layers of texture to build their performance. Naomi Watts is really good here as Luce’s mom. You know Octavia Spencer is going to bring it, wowing you with these little twitches or head turns that make you be in awe of her talents. But my hope is that Kelvin Harrison Jr. becomes a star after Luce. Harrison is an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in god knows what, but on the surface portrays a charming dude who wins over everyone he meets.
The execution of the story is Lee’s biggest gamble. This isn’t a movie about excessive violence: it’s a movie about slow building tension. Each scene provides one new piece of information, some small, some large, in attempts to shift the power dynamics between the characters. The general beats are: character learns something new, confronts the person, then other people find out about that confrontation. Director Julius Onah helps guide the performance to make simple innocent conversations ripple with underwritten dread, because of how those conversations are being presented. The movie has this pulsating, consistent electronic/timpani beat that then gives way to silence when the characters start talking, having those characters adopt the drum’s propulsion. Onah and Lee flirt a little too heavily with unintentional comedy (scenes that are meant to be devastating come of plain silly sometimes), but those scenes are rare and usually momentary. Each new piece of information further complicates the truth of what the hell is going on with Luce, and is he ok, or is he a threat? All of this without us ever seeing any violence, a true testament to how smart this script is at its best.
Luce was NEVER going to be as stupid as one of those made for TV thrillers. The acting is too good. The writing is about something. And the direction keeps the story on the straight and narrow. I know thanks to this movie I’ll try to look at people and see them for who they are, and not who I want them to be. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m about to go to war with myself for a few days…