Last year, for the first time in the history of my channel, when I did my extended video
on the editing in Suicide Squad I indulged in the well worn trope where a reviewer plays
up needing drugs or alcohol to get through the process.
In the script it was supposed to be cooking oil as a total subversion of the trope, but
at the last minute I decided to use an old cough syrup bottle instead, instead
recreating the trope.
Anyway, let's talk about the art of storytelling and The Book of Henry!
I'm going to warn you, The Book of Henry is an infectious movie.
There's a decent risk that knowing about this movie will make you insufferable to friends
and family as you insist on recounting every mind-numbing twist in excruciating detail.
The Book of Henry is a case study in what happens when you spend twenty years writing
and re-writing the same script.
Crime novelist Steven Horwitz originally started shopping the script around in the
mid 90s.
It got some buzz and made the rounds, but ultimately wasn't produced.
Horwitz held on to it and kept making changes as the years passed and he grew older.
It's no wonder, then, that the film is something of a cross section of two decades of cloying
children's films and films-about-children, from Little Man Tate and Radio Flyer, through
Pay It Forward, to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
The end product is, from a critical perspective, like a sudoku puzzle.
The failings and poor decisions are interlinked in a way that explaining one requires understanding
the relative construction of the others.
There is not a singular problem, but a complex system of co-dependant problems that are ultimately
rooted in the insurmountable flaw that is the movie's basic premise.
This is a movie about a mother, Susan, who sets out to murder her neighbour, Glen, and
kidnap his step daughter, Christina, following instructions left behind by her genius son,
Henry, who just died of brain cancer.
Or it's about Henry, a kid genius who decides to kill his neighbour, Glen, but develops
terminal brain cancer and spends his final days preparing meticulous instructions so
his mother, Susan, can carry out the murder and kidnapping after his death.
But it's also a heartwarming, life-affirming reminder that cynicism weighs us down and
we should be doers, not dreamers, and we should murder our neighbours, but only if their kids
are sad, because as we all know, a sad teenager is an abused teenager.
So to start this off properly I'm going to try, as best I can, to simply, factually,
recount the plot of the film without commentary, questions, or asides.
Alright let's go.
Henry and his younger brother Peter get on the bus while Henry, in voice over, waxes
philosophic about the nature of man, suggesting that sometimes people will surprise you, while
the rest of the time people are exactly who they seem to be, which is to say: cruel.
In class Henry improvises his essay project in front of the class, mocks another student,
and tells his teacher that he shouldn't be in an advanced class because
[better for psycho-social development]
While waiting after school Henry buys and sells stocks over the pay phone until mom,
Susan, pulls up in a beat up car.
Henry tells her she should buy a new car because they can afford a new car, but mom says there's
nothing wrong with the old car.
At home Peter bugs Henry over the radio until Henry agrees to let Peter help him with his
Rube Goldberg machine.
That night Susan puts Peter into the bath and then plays video games while Henry does
the family finances, telling mom that she needs to pay more attention.
At bedtime Susan reads the two boys a story that she wrote, she finds an engineering award
that Henry won, and Henry gives the medal to Peter.
At breakfast the next morning Henry continues to bug mom about the finances, trying to teach
her how to use the computer, and the kids correct her middle finger posture when she
flips Henry off.
They're called outside by their neighbour Glen Sickleman, the police commissioner, who
complains about the leaves on their lawn, and Susan dots on the neighbour girl, Christina.
At work Susan banters with her co-worker Shiela.
Her boss, Jon, gives her her paycheck, suggests she set up direct deposit, and Susan says
she'll need to check with Henry.
At school Henry asks Christina how she's doing, and Peter gets beat up.
The medal that Henry gave Peter gets broken.
Back home Peter sulks, Henry cheers him up by doing… this.
Then Susan comes home with Sheila, the two get drunk.
Henry wakes up with a headache, spies on Christina next door, and ominous music tells us something
is up with Glen.
The next morning Susan drives the kids and Christina to school, Henry keeps looking at
her, on the ride to school and in class, then he gets up, storms into the principal's
office, and says "goddammit Janice, how much longer does this have to go on?"
They argue about Christina being abused by Glen.
Goddammit Janice tells him she needs conclusive evidence, and Henry says he'll handle it
alone.
The kids get picked up by Susan after school, and they stop by Sheila's, and then they
get groceries and see a dude beating on his girlfriend and Henry wants to get involved
but Susan tells him to mind his own business.
Henry calls Child Protective Services on Glen, then while everyone is unpacking groceries
Christina puts a lot of weighty emphasis on the fact that Glen is her step… father.
Susan agrees to drive Christina to and from the upcoming talent show because Glen isn't
planning on going.
Susan tells Henry to be less serious.
Henry says he should have gotten involved in the supermarket and that violence isn't
the worst thing.
CPS checks on Glen and Christina, but the head of CPS is Glen's brother, so Henry
starts driving around town on his bike, making notes in a red notebook, buys books on crime
scene investigation, and scouts out a gun store where he overhears some dude trying
to buy an illegal gun by dropping the name "Dominic."
Back home Susan is playing Gears of War and Henry tells her to shut it off.
At bedtime there's an argument about who's enchilada number one and who's enchilada
number two, then Susan sings them a song.
In the middle of the night Susan is woken up by Peter screaming because Henry is having
a seizure.
He's rushed to hospital, it's incurable brain cancer, and Henry explains his own disease
to the neurosurgeon.
Sheila visits Henry in the hospital and kisses him.
[I am not okay with this]
Henry and Susan argue about the finances, Henry tells Peter to make mom read his red
notebook, Henry and Susan argue about finances again, then Henry dies in the middle of the
night.
After a few days, Peter comes home, Susan is making brownies for dinner, and doctor
hottie comes by for a house call where he gives Peter his cell number.
At work Susan is losing her mind, Jon sends her home and tells her that Henry told him
via letter that she has six hundred and eighty thousand dollars in a chequing account, and
even more in stocks and bonds.
At home Peter finds Henry's red notebook, which
[I think Henry wants us to kill Glen]
Susan argues with the book, calls CPS herself, spys on Glen, and then is told by the book
to check the safe where she finds tapes and a walkman.
The tapes walk her step by step through withdrawing money from the bank, avoiding security cameras
at the gun store, and buying
[stuff]
Susan then gets a copy of Glen's signature which she uses, as per the tapes' instructions,
to forge custody papers for Christina.
At the talent show, doctor hottie shows up because Peter invited him.
Once the show starts Susan synchronizes her watch, jumps into her new car that Henry bought,
drives back to the tree fort, and sets up to take the shot.
While she's aiming, back at talent show Christina dances a sad dance, and Goddammit
Janice, seeing the sad dance, goes and makes a phone call.
Back at the treehouse Susan has a brief moment where she realizes that holy crap she's
taking instructions from a tape recorded by her dead eleven year old and decides not to
shoot the police commissioner in the head with a sniper rifle.
Standing ovation.
There's your big Kuleshov Effect moment of the movie, by the way.
Glen confronts her
[what the hell is going on?]
She threatens him, jumps in her car to get back to the talent show, Glen goes home, makes
a phone call, and shoots himself.
Susan gets back just in time for Peter's magic act, where he summons the spirit of
Henry from his trunk in the form of a fake snowstorm.
Christina learns her step father is dead.
The court gives custody to Susan.
Susan burns all evidence of her crimes, and the movie ends with Susan tucking Enchilada
number one and Butterfly number one into bed.
Credits roll.
[title card: Money Problems, or Lack Thereof]
This might seem like an odd point to start the actual autopsy with, but let's talk
about the money issues in the film.
In the middle of the movie, after Henry dies, Susan's boss Jon gives her an envelope,
a letter from Henry, that says she has six hundred and eighty thousand dollars in the
bank, and even more in stocks and bonds.
They're rich!
Henry has, from beyond the grave, saved the family from poverty!
No more will mom be forced to miss bedtime because she's working late!
She can now realize her true passion to be a children's picture book author!
This is a genre touchstone.
These sorts of movies about exceptional kids almost always have some element of overcoming
or just dealing with financial difficulty, often poverty.
It's easy drama.
Little Man Tate, Radio Flyer, and Pay it Forward all hit this beat in one way or another.
Single mom raising one or two kids at the edge of financial ruin, working at a diner,
driving a beat up car, joking with her coworkers about the hardships of being rich.
Here's the problem.
The family in The Book of Henry is doing fine.
They're fine.
Earlier in the film Jon explicitly points out that they live in a nice neighbourhood.
I mean, heck, they live right next door to the police commissioner.
Henry buys and sells stocks over the phone.
Susan only seems to work part time, and it's never a worry about how they'll pay the
bills.
Henry has brain surgery and no one is concerned with how they're going to pay for it.
Hell, our first introduction to Susan is contextualized by money.
[I wish you'd get a new car, it's not like you can't afford it.]
These beats comes up several times, where Henry explicitly points out that they can
afford stuff, and she never disagrees.
In fact the opposite.
She chides him and says that being able to afford it isn't the point.
He also tells Susan that she can afford to quit her job at the diner and focus on writing.
He's constantly telling her to pay attention to the financial statements and investment
reports and bank statements, but the reveal that they have all this money doesn't really
mean anything from a story standpoint.
This scene works just as well if that line is cut, because the actually important line
is this.
[no, you're not fine]
Hell, if anything the scene accidentally implies that she was pretending to be in a paycheck-to-paycheck
situation and that Henry has outed her wealth to her friends and coworkers, humiliating
her.
Now, the fact that the family isn't living in poverty isn't itself a problem.
Just because it's a staple of the genre doesn't make it mandatory, we don't need
that for it to be effective or complete.
But, as you can see from all these examples, the issue of money comes up often.
It is not an unstated dimension or a background detail.
The weird thing is that it actively works against the theme of the film.
This is a rare film that opens with a thesis statement.
Henry's improvised essay in front of the class is a direct philosophical statement
aimed at the audience, and in Henry's little Tyler Durden Jr. screed he explicitly denounces
the exact sort of obsession over money that he then spends the rest of his life pursuing.
[montage]
Ha ha ha, it's a bad movie.
[title card: Henry's Plan is Bad and Stupid]
Henry's plan is bad and stupid.
It's exactly the kind of bad and stupid Rube Goldberg Loony Tunes assassination plan
that you'd expect to be cooked up by a dumb eleven year old.
That in and of itself could be something fun and interesting if it weren't offensively
paired with the incredibly heavy subject of rescuing someone from being raped, and the
fact that an adult follows the plan almost to its completion before having a minor epiphany
that maybe murder isn't actually the answer.
This is all paralleled by constant assertions that Henry is, in fact, a super mega genius
who thinks of everything.
So for fun let's point out all the flaws in this flawless plan.
From the start I need to emphasize that this is a plan to kill Glen.
It's also, theoretically, a plan to rescue Christina from abuse, but first and foremost
it's a plan to kill Glen.
We'll talk about this in more detail later, but so little of the plan revolves around
or involves Christina that, really, rescuing Christina is just the justification for a
plot to kill Glen.
You could swap the motive for anything else and very, very little would change.
The first thing to highlight is that most of this plan is drafted before Henry knows
he's going to die, meaning that he was, in concept at least, intending to somehow
follow through with these steps.
This is a big screenwriting problem because the writer already knows Henry dies before
the character knows, so the plan is accidentally built around the convenience that Henry doesn't
need to execute the plan.
A lot of the smaller details of the plan are suggested as part of various preparation montages,
and illustrations from Henry's notebook, which we fortunately get in close up during
the opening credits.
Despite all the attention given to minute details like the type of bullet used and clearing
all the branches, the basic concept of the plan is really simple.
Get a gun, lure Glen out into the woods, and shoot him in the head from the comfort of
the playhouse.
After that, as per the illustration, the body falls into the river, and then the gun gets
thrown off the bridge into the lake.
The biggest hole here is that every version of the plan revolves around shooting Glen.
Henry explicitly scopes out the gun store, and gets the name Dominic, at a point when
he assumes the headaches are just stress.
Except if we take the cancer out of the equation this is where the plan ends, because even
with the whole Dominic thing, even the gun store owner willing to bend the paperwork
rules for cash isn't going to sell a sniper rifle to an 11 year old.
The next biggest hole is the body.
Again, the scriptwriter knows that neither Henry nor Susan will actually kill Glen, so
they don't bother to sweat the details, which leaves us with Henry intending for Glen's
body to fall into the river, and by river I mean creek.
This creek.
Now, to me, someone who watches way too many police procedurals, this isn't so much a
hide a body creek as much as it's a hey boss, we found-a-body down by the creek creek.
So Henry's master plan to kill Glen is really just kill him in your own backyard and hope
no one suspects his neighbours.
Once we move away from the concept, into the weeds of the details, is when the plan really
falls apart into needless complexity.
The hilarious thing is that Henry repeatedly stresses the need to plan for every contingency,
but then fails to plan for even basic contingencies.
The most glaring hole is in step one: lure Glen out into the woods.
Apparently the best idea the authors could think of was making noise with a walkie-talkie
strapped to an amplifier.
Seriously, that's the plan.
Susan whistles into a walkie-talkie and this noise is suspicious enough that Glen gets
his gun before going to investigate.
It also needs to be stressed here that everything in the details of the plan hinges on a very
tight schedule, as Susan needs to be seen at the talent show, get home, kill Glen, dispose
of the evidence, and get back before anyone notices that she's gone.
So plan for every contingency, but the whole thing falls apart if Glen watches a movie,
gets a phone call, takes a shower, or does literally anything that would prevent or delay
hearing the noise that's supposed to lure him to his death.
A great problem with the plan is that Henry, via tape, has Susan run around to a bunch
of different ATMs to withdraw a few hundred dollars in cash at each.
He says that this is to avoid suspicion and get around withdrawal limits, but hitting
up a bunch of different ATMs in a short span of time is exactly the kind of behaviour that's
going to draw suspicion.
Also, sweetie, you're rich.
You have well over a million dollars in investments and cash.
Just go to the bank and take out the money like a normal person.
It's not even that much.
She only takes out $1500, which is, one, not enough to buy the hardware she gets from the
gun store, and two, not a suspicious amount of money.
That's buying crap off Kijiji money.
Oh, also, last note here, just because it's hilarious
[plywood is slightly thicker than the human skull]
This isn't a flaw in the plan, it's just a really dumb line, one that they were so
proud of they made sure to include it in the title cards.
You're shooting 30 caliber frangible bullets, his skull isn't going to be the problem
here.
[Henry is a Dick]
[emotional intelligence]
That's a mind-boggling statement that just says so much about the way Colin Trevorrow
sees the world.
Henry is the least emotionally aware person in the film.
He's actually a huge prick.
I mean, his first actual scene is him dunking on this kid, Tommy, for not being grown up
enough for Henry's tastes.
Rather than being a kid who has been unfairly forced to grow up by a negligent, absent,
or addicted parent, Henry has self-appointed himself to be the adult.
This is tied to the movie's characterization of Susan, which we'll get to shortly, but
there's no indication that things wouldn't get done without Henry around.
Henry is the kind of person who self-martyrs because they see other people as incompetent.
The film also tries to play Henry two ways, and can't decide which is which.
Susan tells him to spend less time focused on his school work, and there's a whole
half a scene about all the awards that Henry wins for extracurricular activities.
So on one hand we're supposed to think about Henry as the kind of keener who does all the
bonus work, and then some.
But then in that first scene, the Tyler Durden Jr. speech, Henry is supposed to be reading
an essay that he's written, except he's clearly just improvising.
He didn't do the work at all.
So there's the other implication, that he's a waster, the smart kid who thinks the work
is beneath him.
To cap it off, he mocks his teacher.
[psycho social development]
This whole moment is demonstrably false.
Every shot of him in class, he looks absurdly bored, and he doesn't have friends.
Henry spends his lunch playing checkers in the cafeteria with the lunch lady, a scene
where he does the whole movie smart person shorthand of beating the game in one move
just to show that he was in control all along, which is, again, a huge dick move.
It's also incredibly hack on the part of the screenwriter.
Like, this is just the worst kind of lazy trope.
Oh, and we can't forget the scene where Henry, cop on the edge, bursts into Goddammit
Janice's office and threatens to turn in his badge.
Henry also gets really judgy about Susan playing video games.
He mocks the way that she plays, and polices what she does with her free time.
He's actually really, really condescending to Susan.
[montage of times Henry is a dick, don't forget "violence isn't
the worst thing"]
[you're doing it wrong]
What?
No, no she's not.
The middle finger is a gesture with a high degree of plasticity.
You have your classic style
Detroit style
The web shooters
And, of course, The Logan.
There's nothing wrong with her form.
You're not being accurate, you're just being a dick, and you deserve to get flipped
off.
Oh, and how can we forget the part where Henry cooks up a plot to murder his neighbour.
[high degree of emotional intelligence]
[Title card: Susan is Negligent, But Not Really]
How the film characterizes Susan is, for me at least, the weirdest part of the way the
movie is constructed.
All of the previous stuff about the way that Henry interacts with her, there's a dissonance
in that the movie still seems to think that Henry is always correct.
He's an asshole genius as directed by someone who doesn't think that he's an asshole.
The byproduct of this is that every time Henry is a judgy prick to his mom, the framing and
consequences always skew towards Henry.
Even in the big death bed argument, where Henry tells Susan to focus on the finances,
and Susan says it doesn't matter, this isn't ultimately framed as Henry's failure, his
fear in the face of mortality, but instead as Susan's weakness.
Within the framework of the story this isn't Henry in denial, it's Henry trying to tie
up loose ends because he's the adult in the relationship.
Henry's plans and behaviour never actually fail or fall apart.
The closest it gets is when Susan decides not to shoot Glen, but nothing actually comes
from that because Glen kills himself a few minutes later.
This moment, right here, where Susan goes off-script, this is where the story finally
picks up, where the stakes are raised, but then it just ends and everything else goes
according to Henry's plan with no fallout whatsoever.
So this creates a dynamic where the film is constantly suggesting things about Susan that
aren't actually true if you think about it for more than a minute.
From a structural standpoint, the main problem with Susan is that she has no arc as a character
because none of her real problems are addressed, and the problem that is addressed was never
truly a problem.
Susan's deal is that she's complacent.
She's comfortable, she's safe, she's financially secure, and she's just kind
of coasting through life, raising her two kids, enjoying being in a place where nothing
requires her constant, unbroken attention.
She has plenty of time to bond with her kids, drive them to and from school, take them to
events, make them breakfast, and pack their lunches.
Now, she does have a bad case of Cool Mom, she's overly codependent on Henry, and she
has no real ambitions, but the family is, objectively, doing fine.
She's not super keyed into the family finances because she doesn't need to be.
That's the luxury of being well off, regardless of Henry's involvement.
This goes back to everything we talked about with the money sub-plot.
Susan ostensibly doesn't know about all the money that Henry has made on the stock
market, but it doesn't seem to bother Susan at all.
As far as she's concerned the family is financially secure off whatever income she
has, and nothing suggests that if it weren't for Henry they'd be screwed.
I mean, presumably they survived just fine before Henry started trading stocks, right?
Being a Cool Mom is a character flaw, in the absolute sense, but there's no stakes to
it.
It's not causing problems.
Cool Mom is a surface level problem, a behavioural problem, that makes other problems worse.
Being a cool mom didn't lead to Henry's rapid onset terminal brain cancer being overlooked.
It's only kind of a problem for one scene after Henry's death where she has a very
justifiable, but temporary, breakdown.
Nothing that goes wrong in the second half of the movie has anything to do with things
she was failing to do when Henry was alive, things that Henry was doing that she, the
parent, should have been doing instead.
The thing that the movie chooses to use as synecdoche for Susan's negligence is that
she plays video games and has one girls night with Sheila, but none of this is ever at the
cost of anything.
She's not playing games instead of getting groceries or making breakfast.
She's not playing games instead of going to work (which would still be pointless since
the movie has explicitly told us that she doesn't need to go to work in the first
place.)
She's not drinking instead of helping with homework, or getting drunk in the middle of
the day, or inviting Sheila over six nights a week.
She's just playing games, sometimes.
[turn it off]
Yeah, the movie is super judgemental about Susan not spending literally 100% of her time
focused on her kids.
So as a character arc she kind of learns at the very end to see her genius dead kid as
the kid he was and not the small adult he acted like.
But he's already dead, so it's not like that changes anything.
Aside from that she's just kind of complacent.
Her sub-plot about wanting to be a picture book author is, well, it's disingenuous
to even call it a sub-plot.
It's not Susan's ambition so much as it's the one of her three hobbies that the movie
approves of.
[Title card: Christina is a Lamp]
Alright, this one is the heavy one.
Christina's involvement in the film is a textbook example of a prop character.
You could replace her with just about anything and the plot would still work.
She could be a sack of jewels that Glen has stolen and very little would actually change.
The plot to kill Glen is supposedly motivated by the desire to save Christina from abuse,
but Christina isn't involved in it at all.
Her agency in all of this is utterly absent.
This is why it's really just a plot to kill Glen, not a plot to save Christina.
The whole story started from the idea of a genus kid planning the perfect crime, and
the dudes who made it were so busy high-fiving each other for their wit that they didn't
bother to ask if a story about an eleven year old being raped by her step dad was the best
vehicle for that.
[bts tonal tightrope clip]
Jesus, they think they nailed it.
Anyway, Christina only has a half dozen lines in the entire movie, and no one bothers to
even try and empower her, only taking the time to make a few anonymous phone calls before
giving up.
Yet we're expected to believe that she's so close with the Carpenter family that she
has fancy personal handshakes with Susan and slots effortlessly into the hole Henry left
behind.
[disgusted face]
From a storytelling standpoint there's a whole host of problems with how this entire
plot unfolds.
We, the audience, first get an inkling that something's wrong when Henry notices that
Christina is sad on the playground.
That night, by happenstance, Henry is looking out his bedroom window when he sees, presumably,
Christina being abused by Glen.
Now, from our perspective this is the inciting moment.
Henry has discovered a crime, and is now going to start trying to correct it.
The next morning he tries, lightly, to prod Christina in the car, and then, in class,
when she isn't interested in a donut, he gets up, storms into the principal's office
and
[goddammit Janice]
This is complete whiplash.
We're twenty minutes into the movie and all of a sudden this isn't something new,
this is an ongoing thing that he has tried to report before?
He's dumping all this new information that contradicts what we were just told.
Everything about the framing, music, and acting in the previous scenes indicate that this
is new, not some long running thing that Henry has been dealing with.
In the first scene with all the key players nothing about this plot is indicated beyond
the fact that the kids don't particularly like Glen.
Also in one of the weirdest creative decisions, even though Henry says she's been coming
to school with bruises, the hacks that went with this visual shorthand [Henry winning
a game in one move to show he's smart] decided that they weren't going to with a visible
bruise.
It's weird.
Why wouldn't you show us that?
It's the easiest thing to show.
Then goddammit Janice says she needs concrete proof, but bruises weren't enough, I guess?
All of this repeats again at the end, when Susan makes all the same claims, that she
apparently has all this information stashed away, but we've never seen any of it, which
is just asinine in a story that's literally focused on planning and details.
We have the process Henry used to partially forge custody papers, but zilch about gathering
actual evidence against Glen.
The movie has this really weird aversion to making any of the characters actually flawed
or negligent in some way.
If the filmmakers gave Christina visible bruises that they show us, well, suddenly every character
who can see those bruises, including Susan, teachers, and goddammit Janice, are accountable.
Their failure to react or willingness to overlook that information is damning, and makes them
complicit in Glen's abuse.
The movie goes to weird lengths to give everyone an out.
No one makes actual, awful mistakes, they just make implied mistakes.
I mean, that's why they're even doing this flimsy due diligence in the first place.
It's all just shoddy convenience so that Henry can be blameless when he decides to
plan to kill Glen, make it look like there was no other option, instead of implying that
maybe Henry was actually just a little too eager to kill Mister Sickelman next door.
[Title card: Henry is Jesus]
Easily one of the strangest elements of the movie is the weird, mangled Jesus metaphor.
First of all, the movie is called The Book of Henry, an aesthetic call to the naming
of biblical books.
The Book of Matthew, The Book of John, The Book of Jeremiah, Job, Ezra, Ezekiel, Mark,
Luke, Esther, Ruth, Malachi.
Second, Henry's death is an aesthetic call to pieta sculpture.
The thinking man's Jesus imagery, for when a crucifixion pose would be too crass.
Third, Henry's number one disciple, the one who first takes his words and convinces
others of their importance, is named Peter.
Fourth, the family name is Carpenter, which is only about one step down from when Lost
had a metaphysical guide named Christian Shepherd.
Fifth, at the very end Susan reads her new story about how a flower dies and fertilizes
a garden with its body, which is just a muddy repaint of the Christian belief that Jesus
died to exalt mankind, but is also clearly intended as a metaphor for Henry who died…
but made things better in the process?
Okay, so, the movie thinks that its message is about apathy.
[Henry clip]
So the takeaway here is that the death of Henry is what taught Susan to be less apathetic
and to reach out and help others, that she went from being unwilling to intervene in
the grocery store to willing to kill Glen and forge documents in order to save Christina.
But she didn't kill Glen, and, in fact, once she learns about Christina's situation,
especially once she sees it for herself, she's anything but apathetic.
Sure, the things that she tries are largely ineffective and she quickly latches on to
the murder plot, but she doesn't need any persuading to care.
Even in the grocery store, the problem isn't apathy, it's feeling powerless.
She's worried that if she intervenes it will make things worse.
This is not the moral failing she actually overcomes.
It's never even implied that killing Glen might have unforeseen negative outcomes.
Oh, and if you want an actual example of a bad deus ex machina ending, it would be when
principle Goddammit Janice decides, completely independent of the actions of any of the characters,
to finally take do her job in a way that neatly resolves all conflicts while absolving the
central characters for any of their actions.
Susan gets away with attempted murder because Glen kills himself before he can tell anyone
what she did.
[Title card: A Lesson in Imagery]
There's so, so much more we could talk about, but to wrap this up I want to talk about one
scene in particular.
My favourite scene in the whole movie for how utterly absurd it is at every level of
conception.
For Peter's act in the talent show he pushes out a large chest and says that he will make
his brother Henry reappear.
[When I'm done he's going to be here right among all of us]
Now, there's a critical detail from earlier that needs to be mentioned.
After Henry's death there's no funeral scene, not even in montage.
This is important because this moment is supposed to create some uncertainty.
Did Henry, genus child and Jesus metaphor, in fact fake his own death and will now pop
out to the delight of all?
Who knows!
So Peter opens the chest, kicks the chest and it starts spraying fake snow out over
the audience.
Just, everywhere.
Then everyone gets up, standing ovation.
Peter and Susan hug.
So, this scene.
This scene.
Alright.
What's going on here, what they're trying to do.
This is, obviously, a callback to the mountain climbing nonsense from earlier.
Which no one in the crowd would be familiar with, so this is literally just a chest that
spits out fake snow.
Metaphorically, this is the Book of Henry's version of the baptism of fire inside its
mangled Jesus metaphor.
Peter, chief apostle, has preached to the crowd the whimsy of Henry, and his spirit
has descended upon them.
But you know what else it means, visually?
It means that Peter has promised the crowd that his brother Henry would be physically
right here among them.
And then he sprays them with a dry, white powder.
The visual implication, however unintended, is that Peter scatters Henry's ashes over
the crowd.
Standing ovation.
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