How 'Luce' misses a major opportunity to go deep on a subject rarely explored on big or small screens
Filmmakers and actors are allowed to take creative liberties when telling a fictional story. That is, after all, essentially the job. But some subject matter calls for a rigor and depth of thought that the work in question never musters., Julius Onah’s film about a white, upper-middle-class, suburban couple who’ve adopted a black boy from war-torn Eritrea, I struggled with the film’s shortcomings in laying bare the subtle intricacies of interracial adoptions.
In the speech, Luce crisply articulates how thankful he is to his teachers, his peers, but especially to his parents for preparing him for “the battles ahead” and helping him become who he’s “meant to be.” It’s been 10 years since his parents adopted him from Eritrea, where he’d been a child soldier amid brutal military violence. Luce has been through therapy for PTSD , and is a star athlete and straight-A student.
The tensions between white parents and their adoptive black children are generally less obvious than sitting in awkward silence at the dinner table. More often, those tensions exist as a quiet anvil of grief that lifts and lowers the weight on alternating shoulders. In one heated scene between Luce and Amy, Luce attempts to explain to his mother how difficult it is to try to be what everybody wants him to be.
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