Paul Bettany and Sophia Lillis star in Alan Ball’s film about a bookish teenager, her academic uncle and his not entirely inner demons
Alan Ball will probably always be known as the Oscar-winning screenwriter of the 1999 hit American Beauty, though he saw his original script curtailed in the edit, and its themes of identity and sexuality made more opaque than he intended. His subsequent work has tended to focus on repression, sexuality and guilt, and so it proves again with this fervently personal movie.
Sophia Lillis plays Betty, a shy, smart teenage girl growing up in an old-fashioned southern household in the early 1970s. She idolises her smart uncle Frank (Paul Bettany), an unmarried, unconventional guy who left home to become a literature professor in New York, and who always inspired her love of books. When Betty comes to New York as a student, she reconnects with Uncle Frank but, innocent country mouse that she is, Betty is baffled by Uncle Frank having a “roommate”: Walid, played by Ball’s partner and one of the movie’s co-producers Peter Macdissi.