
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, April 27, 1993                   TAG: 9304270093
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: JACK MATHEWS NEWSDAY
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TEEN UPSTAGES DENIRO IN `BOY'S LIFE'

It may be just an illusion, but for the first time, while playing an explosive mental case, Robert De Niro is not the most interesting presence in a movie. In Michael Caton-Jones' "This Boy's Life," the honor goes to 17-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, who gives an astonishingly complex portrayal of a teen-ager trying to overcome abuse and confusion in rural 1950s Washington.

Both characters are familiar. De Niro's Dwight, an auto mechanic with stripped gears between his ears, is another in a long line of scary stepfathers, and De Niro plays him with a combination of dorkiness and menace that puts him only a step or two closer to sanity than his Max Cady in "Cape Fear."

DiCaprio's Toby is a kid bumbling through adolescence, trying to strike the right pose to get along with his peers, while adjusting, badly, to a new life imposed by his mother's marriage to a man seemingly intent on breaking both his spirit and his body.

Other films have worked this same theme - a single mother desperate to find a father figure for her children instead leads them into disaster - as straight horror, the sort that leaves audiences cheering while mad dad catches a hatchet between the eyes.

But the screenplay, adapted by Robert Getchell from Tobias Wolff's autobiographical book, and DiCaprio's wrenching psychological performance ultimately shift the focus away from the story's sensational elements to Toby's internal struggles.

Wolff, now a professor at Syracuse University, recalled the terror of his youth in the first person, and to tell that story from any other point of view would necessarily reduce it.

There are some obvious lapses in the storytelling. Dwight's own teen-age children disappear quickly into the background, and though Barkin's Caroline has a propensity for finding abusive men, how she ends up with someone as devoid of appeal as Dwight is unclear. Why she stays with him, especially after learning on her wedding night that he makes love with the sensitivity and passion of a brown bear scraping bark off a tree, cannot be explained by her son's need for paternal guidance.

Like her stepchildren, Caroline soon becomes part of the furnishings in Dwight's mountain cabin, while Dwight gulps whiskey and breathes fire in the direction of her son.

Caton-Jones, the British director of "Scandal" and "Memphis Belle," builds a lot of tension into the relationship between Dwight and Toby, and De Niro's furies are, as ever, something to behold. But the movie's strongest scenes occur away from the domestic crises, when Toby is trying to cover his pain and insecurities by trying to match vulgarities and swaggers with his unkempt buddies.

This Boy's Life:

Showing at the Tanglewood Mall Theatre. Rated R for language, violence and a sex scene.

by CNB