# Wide Awake (1998)

### reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten

    WIDE AWAKE
     Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D.
     Miramax Films
     Director:  M. Night Shyamalan
     Writer:  M. Night Shyamalan
     Cast: Denis Leary, Dana Delany, Rosie O'Donnell, Robert
    Loggia, Joseph Cross

The ad for "Wide Awake" notes, "First kisses. Outrageous pranks. A teacher with a killer fastball. To survive this year, Joshua Beal will have to stay wide awake." Don't be fooled. There is quite a bit of drama in the film but most of it is internal. One of the teachers may indeed have had a killer fastball, and if two lips touched, the intimacy happened so quickly that no one in the audience saw it. The pranks in "Animal House" might have been outrageous but the most abominable undiscipline here is a tie between a kid who rides a mop and pail through the halls of the Catholic grammar school and another who takes a picture of the Pope out in the rain.

"Wide Awake," unlike other coming-of-age stories, is not about a kid's fears of not fitting in or not getting a date or of needing to escape from abusive parents or an intolerable school. It deals with a ten-year-old's search for God, no less, and the principal suspense it generates is, "Does he or does he not find Him?" Suspense, however, is no more writer- director M. Night Shyamalan's concern than is physical action, and the only resemblance to disease-of-the-week activity is one young man's suffering an epileptic fit, a contrived gesture that does nonetheless serve to put the central figure in touch with the fragility of human existence at all ages.

Ten-year-olds, however gifted, do not often spend much time pondering metaphysical issues. What prompts the adorable Joshua Beal's search for God at such a young age is his closeness with his grandfather, a man who had recently died of bone marrow cancer and who enjoyed a few heart- tugging scenes with his grandson that made his condition all too identifiable. At one point in Joshua's memory the aging Grandpa Beal (Robert Loggia) is in church with Joshua (Joseph Cross), allowing the little one to play with his face, when the priest calls for all sick members of the congregation to step up to the pulpit to receive wafers. At another time, Joshua is competing with his classmates in a hundred-yard dash, falls down, and observes his grandpa at the finish line prodding him to get up and finish the event--as if to say that this would be the last time the two would enjoy an athletic event together.

"Wide Awake" takes a few obligatory pokes at the nuns, but this is no diatribe from the pen of a Christopher Durang. The ladies in habits do not physically abuse their charges, save in one case in which a kid is dragged back to the classroom by his ears. On the contrary they are understanding and even enjoyed by a bunch of boys who act so unlike some cliques in a tough urban school that a cynical city teacher in the audience would laugh out loud if she were not already shedding tears over the plight of the sensitive and loving Joshua. Rosie O'Donnell as Sister Terry tries to get her class involved in Jesus' problems by situating him on a blackboard behind the pitchers' mound hurling the sphere toward Judas at the plate. She discusses Joshua's search for God face to face with the boy, not at all shocked that the fifth-grader has briefly tried exercises of other religions in his desperate attempt to locate Him. Denis Leary fights hard to play a normal, hard-working dad who, together with his wife played by Dana Delaney looks with adoring eyes at everything his son does, and the ensemble of boys in the school play out their roles without sneaking a look at the camera. Joshua's introduction to romance is a fleeting one, but one in which he observes himself getting "a biological reaction" when a pretty girl flirts with him and offers him a rose.

Writer M. Night Shyamalan, whose first movie feature "Praying with Anger," is about an East Indian living in the U.S. and making his first trip to India, must have decided he did not want a G rating, so he threw in the "s" word four times-- which shouldn't bother anyone. It's good to see a heartwarming film so well realized that deals not with the estrangement between generations but with the natural love that the old and young can share. Rated PG. Running Time: 90 minutes. (C) 1998 Harvey Karten

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