Tenderness Review

Crime melodrama Tenderness, based on Robert Cormier's novel, reunites Russell Crowe with John Polson, the actor-turned-director Crowe coupled up with in gay comedy drama The Sum Of Us way back in 1994. Detailing the immediate post-prison actions of a teenaged murderer, our attention is divided fairly equally throughout between three main characters: recently released killer Eric (Jon Foster), vulnerable youth Lori (newcomer Sophie Traub), and melancholy semi-retired cop Lieutenant Christofuoro (Crowe). Both Lori and Christofuoro are obsessed with Eric for apparently very different reasons that strangely turn out to be not a million miles apart.

Told in meandering road-trip format, the film's present day narrative sputters into action with the imminent release of Eric, imprisoned at the age of 15 for slaughtering his overbearing parents. Now 18, Eric has served the briefest of brief sentences, and is, as Christofuoro sees it, now free to kill again. Meanwhile, troubled Lori has followed his case with interest, lovingly pasting newspaper clippings in her diary as a distraction from her terrible home life with her "pervert magnet" mother (the kind of lady who peps up supper with comments like "my stars were really nice this week") and mom's latest abusive boyfriend.

Apparently determined to form some kind of bond with the newly-freed killer, Lori travels to Eric's new home with his aunt (Laura Dern in an underwritten role bearing an unfortunate resemblance to Mark Gatiss' Val Denton creation in 'The League Of Gentlemen') and hides in his car immediately prior to his departure on a cross-country road trip. Little do the teen odd-couple know that a hang-dog Christofuoro is on their trail.

What unfolds is just barely held together at the seams by some committed performances. Sophie Traub gives a pitch-perfect turn as would-be worldly Lori. She's a credible addition to cinema's canon of girls robbed of girlhood, joining the likes of Natalie Portman's Mathilde (Leon), Sue Lyon/Dominique Swain's Lolitas, and Juliette Lewis in a number of her earlier roles. To the film's credit, the too-easy temptation to have her play opposite an obvious monster is resisted. The creepy thing about Jon Foster's blank Eric is how much like a bog-standard troubled teen he seems half the time, but there's an appropriate disconnect there; he sees human emotion as weak and recoils from anything that inspires it in himself. Unlike most movie psychopaths of his ilk he's not in steely control - the sense Foster strives for is of a sick man unable to either resist his own compulsions or fully understand why they are so wrong.