Critics reviews

This Boy’s Life’s central weakness is the direction; Caton-Jones’... approach is highly conventional to say the least. He relies on tacky montages too frequently to account for, and also shifts in time to cover, a series of emotional events. Despite the weakness of direction, This Boy’s Life remains an incredible example of outstanding acting and fine screenwriting.

This Boy's Life is a very violent story; the abuse is both psychic and physical and always present or, ar least, imminent, which gives the movie a highly uncomfortable edge. Thus, by the movie's final blow-out, the tension has become almost unbearable though it's less from curiosity about what will happen to the characters than a feeling that you just can't abide watching such abuse a minute longer.

The movie is very involving. We identify with Toby, we understand (but do not excuse) Caroline's passivity, and in Dwight, as played by De Niro, we see a pathetic but unforgettable villain.

"This Boy's Life," adapted from the coming-of-age memoir by Tobias Wolff, overcomes the temptation to view '50s adolescence - either the hero's or America's - through the Vaseline-coated lens of nostalgia. It challenges the cherished notions that youth was sweeter then, and that the American family was more functional. Like the more accessible "Stand by Me," it is an affecting teen melodrama haunted by twisted treehouse memories.

It's as if Michael Caton-Jones, the director... had wanted to make a comedy on the nostalgic order of "American Graffiti." "This Boy's Life" is so steeped in period detail (music, cars, television shows, hair styles) that Toby and Caroline's sad, bumbling search for freedom seems secondary, almost impolite to the decor.

Yet something in this story appears to have touched Caton-Jones, to have brought back the strength of “Scandal,” his directing debut, for he responds beautifully to the challenges of the material... And he has avoided (despite an emphatic Hollywood ending that departs from the book) either condescending to the situation or downplaying its harrowing aspects.

It’s painful to watch Wolff’s witty, touching and sometimes tragic evocation of childhood degenerate into a horror film... This Boy’s Life becomes This Dwight’s Life on film and a bogus version of that life to boot. What’s lost is the chance to make a movie that shows a more subtle form of child abuse, the kind that leaves emotional scars that last for life.

[T]hough De Niro is physically commanding — he makes the threat of violence scarily omnipresent — there are no shades to his hollow, exhibitionistic performance. His Dwight is like Jake LaMotta without the wounded core... [but] you can catch a glimpse of what the movie might have been in Leonardo DiCaprio’s eloquent performance as Toby, whose fear and helplessness can’t quite mask the pride that Dwight resents in him.

Screenwriter Robert Getchell and director Michael Caton-Jones have fashioned plenty of dramatically valid sequences, but they add up to less than the sum of their parts. All hands, notably production designer Stephen J. Lineweaver, costumer designer Richard Hornung and lenser David Watkin, have contributed handsomely to evoking a late-1950s atmosphere.