A married couple is forced to reckon with their idealized image of their son, adopted from war-torn Eritrea, after an alarming discovery by a devoted high school teacher threatens his status as an all-star student.
Luce (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) tries to forget his dark past as he struggles with his own identity, feeling the need to live up to not only his mother Amy (played by Naomi Watts) and father’s (played by Tim Roth) expectations of him, but his history teacher Ms. Wilson’s (Rosemary Wilson).
The film opens with Luce giving a speech to the student body with his family and peers in awe. This is an important introduction in understanding how he builds up resentment from the pressure of his family, teachers, and friends to maintain this facade of a perfect model citizen. Besides being a Straight-A student, he is Valedictorian, an amazing athlete, gets along with everyone and could do no wrong. After the film sets us up to believe that Luce is immortal, we get his backstory of how he became who he is; well sort of.
Apparently, Luce grew up as a child soldier in Eritrea, North Africa, and after being adopted by a white family and years of therapy to rid him of his horrible memories, he is now a teen that excels at everything easily, obeys his parents, fits in with everyone at school, is loved and praised by all of his teachers, except one. Luce admits to his parents that his history teacher Ms. Wilson is becoming a problem. She is hard on him and constantly uses him as an example for everything political. As the story builds, our perfect Luce begins to show his dark side while attempting to rid himself of how everyone wants him to be and become who he really is.
Strange things begin to happen that can’t quite be explained. First, dangerous explosive fireworks are found in Luce’s locker by Ms. Wilson and she confronts his parents who take up for him. Then we find out that Luce is a witness in the alleged sexual assault of his friend Stephanie (Andrea Bang). Then Ms. Wilson’s home is vandalized, the N-word is spray painted on her window and Luce denies having anything to do with it. Later on, Stephanie confesses to Amy that she and Luce used to date and broke up but moments after, we see Stephanie and Luce naked together in a shack in the woods. Didn’t see that coming! Wait, Luce is not clean and pure? So disappointed.
There are so many issues I had with this film and why it just didn’t work for me. First of all, I am tired of this so-called white savior theme, let’s adopt a black child from Africa and mold him into what we think is acceptable. Next, it seemed to want to go the radial route with Luce rebelling with explosives? Oh, did I tell you Ms. Wilson’s office was set on fire? Yeah, it exploded out of nowhere. The film also wanted to introduce random racism but never really spoke about it between Luce and his own parents, it just got messy. I didn’t believe, for one minute, that Luce was a child soldier. There were no flashback scenes or anything to help the audience create that connection. There is a line where his parents talk about his years of therapy to help get over his trauma, but we the audience don’t see any of this nor do we see residual trauma from Luce.
It’s very difficult to believe this story especially since it happened only ten years ago. People are in therapy their wholes lives for fewer issues but a few years stripped away his memories of killing people as a child and transformed him into this perfect guy who cares what his parents think of him? I didn’t believe the characters’ relationships either. The chemistry just wasn’t there, not between Luce and his parents and not between this Stephanie who was supposed to be his ex that she loved so much. I do, however, love the relationships Ms. Wilson had with Luce, she was no-nonsense and brought out his best personality, whether that be anger or frustration, it was real.
I thought the move tried too hard. The story would have worked just fine had he been just some foster kid they adopted from Brooklyn, why a child soldier? I didn’t care for the cast, they were not aligned with each other. I didn’t believe Luce and his parents were an actual family. They were just super weird with each other. I also thought the story was unnecessarily too much and it wasn’t believable. I give it credit for effort but don’t rush to see this one.
“Luce” recently premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival
