美国国家公共电台 NPR When The Wild Rumpus Stops: 'We The Animals'（在线收听）

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

A debut novel by young Latino writer, "We the Animals," made a splash in literary circles when it was published in 2011. An autobiographical story about preteen brothers and their turbulent home life, it seemed an unlikely candidate for film adaptation, but critic Bob Mondello says "We The Animals" has become a haunting fever dream of a movie.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: A hot summer in upstate New York, three shirtless boys running wild the way kids do. Jonah's the youngest, the storyteller...

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WE THE ANIMALS")

EVAN ROSADO: (As Jonah) Us three.

MONDELLO: ...Scribbling in his journal about wanting more - more volume...

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WE THE ANIMALS")

ROSADO: (As Jonah) Us kings.

MONDELLO: ...More muscles, more time with Manny and Joel.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WE THE ANIMALS")

ROSADO: (As Jonah) Us brothers.

MONDELLO: The three of them so inseparable they often seem a single organism - bouncing off the walls, tearing across a field, being at the moon, turning every flat object in the house into a drum, and when all of that gets old, huddling under a sheet, whispering.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WE THE ANIMALS")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTORS: (As characters) Body heat, body heat, body heat.

MONDELLO: Childhood is a magical time for these three, and a complicated time, too, as their sons of a mixed race couple who've moved upstate looking for a good life that hasn't really materialized. Dad's Puerto Rican and a nightwatchman. Mom's white and works in a bottling plant. Dead-end jobs struggling to make ends meet was not the plan.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WE THE ANIMALS")

RAUL CASTILLO: (As Paps) Shake it, papito, come on.

(LAUGHTER)

CASTILLO: (As Paps) All right. Now shake it like you're rich.

MONDELLO: While mom and dad are crazy at love, they're also fighters - she, protective...

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WE THE ANIMALS")

SHEILA VAND: (As Ma) This truck - it doesn't even have enough seatbelts to protect your family.

MONDELLO: ...He, rough and tumble, sometimes just rough.

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CASTILLO: (As Paps) OK. You win. You win.

MONDELLO: Left to their own devices, the boys have to figure out what's happening when, say, dad leaves after one fight that left mom bruised.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WE THE ANIMALS")

ROSADO: (As Jonah) Will you get up today?

VAND: (As Ma) How do I look?

ROSADO: (As Jonah) Purple.

JOSIAH GABRIEL: (As Joel) Crazy.

ISAIAH KRISTIAN: (As Manny) Tore up.

MONDELLO: That rates a note and an illustration in Jonah's journal, scribbled by flashlight after his brothers are asleep and animated with scratchy pen drawings as the film lets the scenes in Justin Torres' autobiographical novel surface and recede the way memories do. Filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar is a documentarian making his first fiction feature here, working with youngsters who'd never acted before and creating a dreamlike narrative where Jonah's carousing merges with his fantasies about adulthood and his confusion over things his parents say and do - dad, loving and leaving, mom, loving and clinging.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WE THE ANIMALS")

VAND: (As Ma) Promise me you'll stay 9 forever.

ROSADO: (As Jonah) How?

VAND: (As Ma) Simple, you're not 10, you're 9 plus one. Next year, you'll be 9 plus two.

ROSADO: (As Jonah) Why?

VAND: (As Ma) You be telling them that no matter how old you are, you be Ma's baby boy.

MONDELLO: She hugs him close.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WE THE ANIMALS")

VAND: (As Ma) I remember your heart inside me, ticking like a bomb.

MONDELLO: Ticking like a bomb, that's quite the image and applies equally well to Jonah at age 9, ticking like a bomb with budding sensual feelings and the realization that there are ways in which he is not like his brothers. "We The Animals" are about to grow up, grow to be men, grow, in the case of journal-keeping Jonah, perhaps to be a writer who'll capture this summer when things began to change and make it intense, scary, ecstatically lyrical. I'm Bob Mondello.