POWDER. Directed and written by Victor Salva; produced by Roger Birnbaum and Daniel Grodnik for Hollywood Pictures. Starring Sean Patrick Flanery, Mary Steenburgen and Lance Henriksen. Rated PG-13.
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I want to like this movie, I really do. It is so earnest and high-minded and serious about what are some quite important issues: tolerance ... empathy ... electricity.
And it is pretty entertaining, most of the time. But I just couldn't like it as much as I wanted to.
For one thing, it fumbles around too much in the plot area. "Powder" is the nickname for a mysterious boy who is raised in isolation by his grandparents after his mother dies in childbirth and his father disowns him.
When the grandparents die, though, he's forced to make the world's acquaintance. And, since he's pretty unusual-looking, (skin white as chalk, no hair) and possesses some spooky super-human powers (severe attraction for lightning, reads minds, etc.) he has an understandably difficult time.
There's nothing wrong with this plot premise, in fact, it's pretty interesting. But the movie just ambles around with it, rather than taking it somewhere. In the course of this rambling, Powder comes up maddeningly short in the character area, as well. Except for Powder himself, that is, who is appealingly and sympathetically played by Flanery (TV's "Young Indiana Jones").
Steenburgen is appropriately motherly as the director of a state home for boys, but we never learn anything else about her. Henriksen does a good job underplaying the local sheriff, who has a dying wife, but Jeff Goldblum, who brings his usual quirky energy to the role of the high school science teacher, doesn't have a chance to flesh out his character as much as we would like him to. In fact, he pretty much disappears for the whole middle of the movie.
Another, rather surprising shortcoming in this era of super-duper computerized special effects is the movie's main special effect, Powder's appearance. His white skin usually looks real enough, but if he's really an albino, his eyes should be much lighter in color than they are. It should be an easy task to morph something like that with today's technology.
And I'll swear that right after a doctor mentions his complete lack of body hair, I glimpsed what looked like powdered-over armpit hair—couldn't he have just shaved for the filming? These are small points, to be sure, but they distract from the central figure of the movie, and that can color (oops, sorry) our response to every scene.
Another note that might be a criticism for some viewers, an attraction for others. Powder is shamelessly manipulative in the emotional area. It is actually a first-rate tearjerker, for my fellow connoisseurs of this underrated art form. The sub-plot involving the sheriff and his wife made me wish I had brought a whole box of kleenex, and the tragic nature of Powder's predicament can give you a quite satisfying cry. If you get off to such things—Enjoy!
November 8, 1995