DAN WEBSTER:
For some of us, middle school was a nightmare.
My seventh-grade year, for example, took place in Rhode Island. My naval officer father was attending the U.S. Naval War College in Newport. We lived in nearby Middletown, but, inexplicably, there was no place to put seventh-graders in the local school district. So, we were bussed 20 miles or so north to Portsmouth where we attended class in a tawdry, converted miliary barracks.
The fact that the school officials would make us stand outside in the freezing snow until classes began was bad enough, but what we faced when we were finally allowed inside the building was actually worse.
Though I was barely 12 years old, I had guys in my class who were a couple of years older and whose greasy, pompadour hairstyles made them all look like outcasts from a stage production of Blackboard Jungle.
Every day involved the potential for hazing, if not outright physical abuse, and this was decades before school districts got serious about bullying. We kids were on our own. It’s no wonder that, years later in a college literature course, I so connected with William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies—the one that tells the tale of boys marooned on a desert island who revert to savagery.
That novel, and memories of my own seventh-grade experiences, came back to haunt me as I sat through writer-director Charlie Polinger’s film The Plague. It should come as no surprise that the feelings that welled up inside me weren’t the slightest bit pleasant.
In The Plague, we follow the story of 12-year-old Ben (played by Everett Blunck). Ben has just moved from Boston with his mother. The year is 2003, and we meet him on the first day that he is attending a water-polo summer camp (and although the camp is situated in an unnamed U.S. city, the scenes were shot mostly in Bucharest, Romania).
Two things are obvious from the start. One is that Ben is a nice kid, a little shy and unsure of himself, but anxious to fit in. Two is that fitting in isn’t going to be easy. And that’s because writer-director Polinger is more interested in making a kind of teen horror study than he is in chronicling the actual middle-school experience.
Almost immediately, Ben gets singled out for having a minor speech impediment (he tends to say “sop” instead of “stop,” which earns him the nickname “Soppy”). And his chief antagonist is Jake (played by Kayo Martin), the kind of natural leader whom most of the other kids willingly follow.
One who doesn’t is Eli (played by Kenny Rasmussen), an outsider who seems to invite abuse. It doesn’t help that Eli has contracted some sort of rash that he keeps covered, even while swimming. His rash, then, is what Jake and the others call "the plague," though the term carries a larger, symbolic meaning as well.
Being the inherently nice kid that he is, Ben tries to understand the situation. Knowing that the tales of “the plague” can’t be true, he tries to befriend Eli. But Eli has problems beyond his skin condition, and soon Ben is caught between Jake and his crowd and Eli the loner. And things get ever more complicated when Ben begins to see signs of a rash on his own body.
Much of what Polinger gives us is visually impressive. The facility in which the camp is being held looks like a junior college, with long halls and a picturesque, Olympic-size pool. And in scene after scene, all of which are underscored by an ominous soundtrack, we watch from below the surface as the boys dive into the pool, the violence of the implosions they cause providing an artistic contrast with the aqua blue of the water.
The acting, too—of Blunck, of Rasmussen, of Joel Edgerton as the well-meaning but clueless water-polo coach, but especially of Martin as a junior sociopath-in-training—is notable. The film’s flaw is that Polinger is more interested in simply making a caricature of middle-school angst than coming up with any kind of meaningful statement about it.
Which is too bad because capturing the "why" behind hurtful adolescent interaction is something that even Blackboard Jungle managed to do.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio.