By D Kegan

This film is a love story between a young man and his gun named Wendy. Directed by Thomas Vinterberg and written by Lars Von Trier, Dear Wendy makes a compelling argument for the misguided youth of America. While alienation and the glamorization of firearms have led to serious consequences across the high schools of America, it has rarely been captured realistically on film. So while it is a noble effort, Dear Wendy starts with a bang but ends off the mark.

Dick Dandelion (Jamie Bell) is a young man living in a small mining town called Estherslope. Having lost his mother as a child, he is raised by his black housekeeper Clarabelle and his coal-miner father. He knows he must do something else with his life if he is not to suffer his father's fate. Clarabelle gets Dick a job working in the local grocery store where he meets Stevie. Both recluses, their friendship forms only after they discover that they share a love of guns. Dick and Stevie form a group known as “The Dandies” and invite the other town misfits who also share their love for guns. The Dandies meet down in the abandon shafts of the coal mines where they work on their shooting skills and develop a secret society based on studying the history of guns, forensic bullet wounds, assassins and their weapons among other rituals that they partake in together. All of these self-proclaimed “pacifists with guns” find the peace, hope and community in their brotherhood that each of them had been looking for all their lives. The only rule that the club has is that their firearms can never be used on another human being, as that would be the antithesis of what they are trying to achieve, which is no less than metamorphosis from losers to winners all from packing heat. And of course, all rules we made to be broken.

A tense moment between Jamie Bell's Dick and Danso Gordon's Sebation in DEAR WENDY.

The Dandies begin to go astray when a young man named Sebastian (Danso Gordon) shows up. Sebastian was Clarabelle's grandson that Dick never liked. Out on parole for murder, Sheriff Krugsby (Bill Pullman) asks Dick to be Sebastian's parole officer. Having noticing the increased confidence in Dick, Krugsby feels he would be a positive influence on Sebastian. And with that the story begins to take a turn from an interesting look at American subculture to no less than theater of the absurd. Of course the one bad apple shows up to turn all these pacifists into brutal killers, albeit very glamourous killers, through a plot that is convenient as it is ridiculous. Von Trier wrote the script apparently with an idea in mind, but a feasible plot is never laid out. There is mention of some street gangs that are terrorizing the sleepy town of Estherslope, but there is never any palpable evidence that they exist. What's more bizarre is a terrorized Clarabelle using the aid of The Dandies to protect her from these gangs that don't seem to exist as she needs to deliver a cup of coffee to her daughter and it leaves the story high and dry. The final showdown between
the now gun-weilding Dandies and the Sheriff looks like the shoot-out at the OK Corral. The characters take on cartoonish quality deflating any credibility the story ever possessed.

Bill Pullman gives a grounded performance as the slightly off-kilter Sheriff Krugsby. His seasoned experience is a welcome sight to this largely young and less experienced cast. Alison Pill gives the stand out performance of the film
as Susan, the wallflower who comes into her own as a Dandy. Danso Gordon as Sebastian is horribly miscast. Looking right out of 21 Jump Street, his TV acting is unbearably over the top and he is way too savvy to be a small town kid. Also miscast is Jamie Bell. While his breakout performance as “Billy Elliot” was astonishingly raw, he now has gained a sophistication that works against the grain of the character as he seems too smart, too educated to bring Dick to light.

What is missing is conviction from Vinterberg and it is due to the half-choices that are made throughout the film. What could have been a really interesting look about the state of American youth falls short. Go rent Bowling for Columbine instead.

Dear Wendy is not rated and is currently in theaters.