# Trans (1998)

### reviewed by
Dennis Schwartz

TRANS (director/writer: Julian Goldberger; screenwriter: Michael A. Robinson; cinematographer: Jesse Rosen; editor: Affonso Goncalves; cast: Ryan Daugherty (Ryan Kazinski), Jon Daugherty (Ryan's Younger Brother), Justin Lakes (Justin), Edge (Bus station Manager), 1998)

    Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

A bleak look at a troubled teenager's life when he escapes from the Southwest Florida Juvenile Detention Center. This fictionalized film looks as if it could be a documentary, shot in the cinema verite style. Its main focus is on Ryan Kazinski (Ryan Daugherty), a troubled 16-year-old, going nowhere fast, who thinks of himself as an alien from another planet.

With only one month left to serve his reform school sentence, after being in solitary confinement, he is on a highway chain gang where a fight breaks out and he impulsively runs away with two others while the guards are distracted.

After the trio are joyfully horseplaying through the swamps to escape, they stop at a rural rest stop and the other two steal a car and leave him on his own in southwest Florida. We know the bare minimum about him: he never mentions a father, his mother might or might not live in Denver, and he lives with his younger brother in Ft. Meyers, whom he injured in a swimming pool accident when they were youngsters. The two brothers have grown close but Ryan doesn't have what it takes to be there for him when needed.

This kid's a downer, with a low attention span and a naive recognition of how messed up he is. He's clueless about his goals or who he is. He seems to be stupid and unaware of what he is doing, and he doesn't have anyone to talk to who might help. At the rural general store, among the good ol' white boys, after he is abandoned by his fellow escapees, he is involved in a light conversation with them as they recognize the predicament he's in, and when they ask what his yearnings are, he mentions: To go to Colorado. Just live in the snow.

First-time director Julian Goldberger got into the kid's head and presented a haunting portrayal of what it is like to be lost and frightened in a world that is too complex for this junk food eating kid, who looks like a psycho with his crew-cut but is as soft as a Twinkie. What the film does best besides have their unlikely antihero be the appealing voice of the film, is catch the desolate mood of the locale. What it forgets to do, is tell a good story.

Ryan's quest for freedom takes him home, as he travels in a night world consisting of the small towns in the Everglades that are rife with speeding cars, flickering street lights, laundrymats, bus depots, convenience stores, fast-food shops, and groups of unsupervised teenagers out past their curfew, some looking for fights, with danger always lurking, as one hears the persistent sound of the police sirens. The place looks like a nightmare created by a madman, as this locality is bereft of anything but a pop culture mentality and desperate youngsters on the prowl.

What is obvious from the word go in this film, doesn't change by the end: the kid shows no signs of taking responsibility for his own life and there is no family to support him. That the prison system is not the answer for kid's like this, is also obvious. Why he was in prison is not given, but there's hints that he was picked up as a sniffer of chemicals or some other minor offense. This kid is certainly not a hardened criminal, which is the shame of it all, as there seems to be no answers from society or from this film what to do about lost souls like him. At least, the film makes clear that its position is that incarceration is not the answer, which certainly goes against the current grain of thinking in America.

Despite the film's good look and the way it uses a novel approach in its film language to echo what Ryan is thinking, everything seems surface deep. It could have used something else to compensate for the mindlessness of Ryan to go along with his painful tale of hopelessness and the film's evocative atmosphere, which wears thin after awhile.

    REVIEWED ON 5/23/2000     GRADE: C+

Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"

    http://www.sover.net/~ozus

    ozus@sover.net

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