Hide Your Smiling Faces

Writer/director Daniel Patrick Carbone’s “Hide Your Smiling Faces” is not a film overly concerned with narrative momentum. It’s less about what happens than how the characters react to their surroundings and situations. It’s long on mood and short on plot. This isn’t very much dialogue, and what there is isn’t very important.

I liked this drama in parts, though it doesn’t add up to much more than a quiet, evocative journey through rural America. The greenness of the trees enfolds the screen like Mother Nature’s gentle hand, stilling the turmoil of the young men who fret and labor underneath.

Nicholas Bentgen’s cinematography is tremendously beautiful while also taking on an eerie feel at times. We feel the vastness of these spaces and are both inspired and discomfited by it.

Tommy (Ryan Jones) and Eric (Nathan Varnson) are brothers of perhaps 11 and 14 years, respectively. They’re right on the cusp where parents allow them a great deal of freedom to roam and discover, but no one expects them to act like adults just yet.

Eric seems like a typical big brother, both teasing and protecting Tommy. But as the tale goes on, he is revealed to have some disturbing patterns of behavior that increase in intensity. Beneath his winsome, placid demeanor, there is a churning anger.

Tommy is less athletic and outgoing, more inquisitive and sensitive. He follows around in Eric’s wake, taking his cues and admonitions from the older sibling. But he also senses that something is not quite right about him.

Their next-door neighbor is Ian (Ivan Tomic), whose Irish father (Colm O’Leary) is angry all the time, seeming to have confused his role of protector with that of a hard-case. When he catches the boys playing with his pistol, he instructs Ian to “run off into the woods and cry,” which seems less a lesson than mere cruelty.

Later, after an inexplicable tragedy, things will escalate between the households. Ian’s dad threatens to shoot the brothers’ dog after it wanders onto their property, and later the boys discover a cache of dead animals that could be the man’s handiwork.

What does it all mean? It’s hard to really say.

In many ways this movie reminded me of Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” a film that enthralled and vexed me in equal measures. Non-traditional narratives are perfectly all right, but they have to have a sense of themselves, where they are going and what they want to accomplish.

“Hide Your Smiling Faces” feels more like an filmmaker’s exercise about honing the ability to command a cinematic space without much in the way of words or action. I would love to see Carbone and his cast take those skills and apply them to something more meaningful.

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