The Good Son (film) (Alternity)

The Good Son is a 1992 American psychological thriller/horror film produced and distributed by 20th Century Fox and directed by Michael Lehmann. Set largely in the coastal town of Rock Harbor, Maine in early December 1993, it follows a twelve year-old boy who has lost his mother to cancer, and is sent to stay with his cousins while his father goes overseas on business. The boy soon discovers that his oldest cousin is a sociopath with a love of deadly games, hiding under a mask of innocence, and sets out to stop him from committing murder.

Plot
It is the afternoon of December 1, 1993, in Apache Junction, Arizona, an eastern suburb of Phoenix. Twelve year-old Mark Evans (Elijah Wood) is competing in his school's pre-winter break soccer championship game against another team of schoolkids from Columbia when his coach pulls him from the game. Immediately, Mark spots his father, Jack (David Morse) near the bleachers and shudders involuntarily, already knowing why: his mother. Jack drapes his son's red warmup jacket over his shoulders and leads him off to their car. A short time later, they arrive at a clean, modern and nondescript hospital and take an elevator up to the fourth floor. Mark is greeted by a sense of dread as they approach a balding older man in a white lab coat and scrubs standing outside a room in the ICU. As Jack talks with the doctor, Mark quietly slips into the room to sit by his mother Janice (Linda Hamilton), now a shell of her former self. Janice wakes and immediately lays eyes on her son, mustering enough strength for one last time. She consoles Mark and tells him to "Trust in yourself...", and find his own strength. Janice then falls asleep again, and after a time, Mark reluctantly leaves, but not before promising her that he won't let her die.

Around four the next morning, Janice dies in her sleep, and a sleepless Jack receives the call from the hospital. A short time later, he calls up his brother Wallace (Daniel Hugh Kelly) in Maine. Both Wallace and his wife Susan (Mary Steenburgen) are woken by the call, and are deeply saddened to hear of Janice's death. While Wallace immediately makes plans to fly out to Arizona, Susan stays just outside their bedroom, head in her hands. A series of padded footfalls alert her to someone's presence at the far end of the hall. She looks up, briefly startled, but then sighs. The shadowed figure asks what's going on, and Susan tells him to wait until morning. He shrugs and retreats into a darkened room nearby.

A few days later, the memorial service is held at Jack's old church and Janice is buried in the nearby cemetery. That afternoon, at Janice's wake, Jack learns that his company is negotiating a deal in Japan and needs him in Tokyo for two weeks to close it. If not, the company will go under. After a tense argument with Wallace, Jack reluctantly agrees to go, and bring Mark out to Maine to stay with Wallace's family the following week. That night, after everyone has gone, Jack breaks the news to Mark, who just barely acknowledges his father and climbs one of the trees in the backyard to observe the sunset, and to be alone with his thoughts.

The next morning, Jack and Mark set out in the old Jeep, but almost immediately, Mark shuts his father out, and pours himself into a handheld game. This only serves to force a confrontation, in which Jack pulls off the road and Mark runs from the car, only to stop halfway into the desert, realizing that he has no place to go. Jack walks up to his son, silent for a time, but he soon ends up telling Mark how one time Janice convinced him to hike the Grand Canyon, easing Mark's sudden hostility. Over the next four days, they pass through eleven states (not counting Arizona and Maine), stopping at Oneida in Oklahoma, a log-cabin hotel in Missouri, the world's first McDonald's near Chicago, a car museum in Detroit, the AN Tower in Yorktown, and Niagara Falls before continuing on non-stop to the bitingly-cold east coast of Maine, where Mark sees the Atlantic for the first time.

Early that afternoon, they arrive in Wallace (and Jack's) hometown of Rock Harbor and make their way to Wallace's house, located on a stretch of largely forested seaside property (actually a peninsula) to the south of town. To his own surprise, Mark finds the house inviting, despite its size. Wallace and his five year-old daughter Connie (Jamie Renée Smith) are waiting outside to meet them, and while an exuberant Connie shows Mark the outside of the house, Wallace asks Jack how Mark is handling everything, at which Jack tells him of their fight the first day of the trip (when Mark told his father that he believed Janice wasn't really gone) and that he honestly doesn't know how Mark is doing. Connie then proceeds to drag Mark inside, where he meets Susan for the first time in ten years, and feels a kind of intuitive connection with her, though he doesn't really know why. Jack and Wallace come back in from outside and Jack strikes up a conversation with Susan, when she informs him that they've invited a good friend of her and Wallace's, a therapist named Alice Davenport, for dinner. Jack is hesitant, but lets Susan know the gesture is appreciated. A shrill cry from Connie turns everyone's attention to the top of the stairs, where a grim white face leers out over the banister. A bemused Wallace orders him downstairs. The blond-haired boy leaps down the stairs and into the entryway, where he feigns a leg injury and utters zombie-like noises, but just as quickly straightens up and lifts the mask. A mildly embarrassed Susan and Wallace introduce him as their son Henry (Macaulay Culkin). Henry then hands Mark a second mask, so they "...can be brothers." Surprisingly enough, Mark quickly takes to the idea.

Over the next few hours, Connie gives Mark an informal tour of the house, after which Henry joins them and they head outside to the family's small private beach, nestled in a small cove between two mid-size cliffs. The three spend nearly an hour there before heading inside to warm up. While preparing them some hot chocolate, Susan notices Mark's shivering even after coming inside cites his light jacket. She immediately suggests that he borrow one of Henry's heavier jackets; and for a split second, Mark sees the coldest of looks on Henry's face. But Henry quickly seems to agree quite amicably and tells Mark "What's mine is yours." After dusk and just before dinner, Mark sees the first example of sibling rivalry between Henry and Connie when Henry corrects his little sister at every turn (after Mark asks a question about portraits of Susan's parents). At dinner, Mark is introduced to Alice Davenport (Jacqueline Brookes) and gets a second glimpse at Henry's goof-off and carefree nature when the boy pretends to guzzle from a bottle of wine. He also proceeds to 'test' Mark by kicking him in the shins under the table; Mark responds in kind, and following a laugh over being 'stealthy' they quickly strike up a rapport. Both Alice and Jack see how well the boys are doing together, and she reassures Jack that they'll get along just fine. After dinner is over and Alice has gone, Jack and Mark say a heartfelt goodbye in the cold, snowy night air. Jack tries to reassure his reluctant son that he'll be fine and tells him to have fun over the next couple of weeks. Mark tries to believe that as his father drives off into the night.

The next morning, Mark wakes to find Henry already up, and outside, carrying materials for some kind of project. Before heading downstairs to join Henry outside, a door ajar down the hall catches his eye and he peers inside. It's a room meant for a young toddler, but what really piques Mark's interest is that everything in it is untouched, 'like in a museum'. Then he remembers: it would have belonged to Henry and Connie's younger brother Richard, who drowned in the bathtub the previous year at the age of two. After eating a rather quick breakfast at Susan's insistence, Mark throws on his borrowed jacket and runs outside to join Henry, where he is greeted by a football he barely manages to catch. Startled, he throws it back with force, knocking the wind out of Henry. Mark rather quickly forgets his startled anger and follows his cousin into the nearby woods, where Henry is building himself a treehouse in the upper branches of a tall, old chestnut tree. Tying a bundle of planks to his back, Henry starts up, using a series of planks nailed to the trunk as a crude ladder of sorts. Not wanting to be seen as afraid, Mark follows somewhat reluctantly and is nearly at the top when a branch just below the platform gives under his weight. Henry grabs him before he can fall, but instead of helping him up, gazes at Mark with a rather empty, disinterested look and asks "If I let you go, do you think you could fly?" Too terrified to answer, Mark dangles over the edge of the platform at his cousin's mercy, Connie watching from below, before Henry finally pulls him up. Ten minutes later, with the platform now expanded, they slide down a rope to the bottom; there, Mark finds the branch that fell from under him, with a clean cut partway through it, and Henry chases after Connie, who now has his football. Even after prying the ball away from her, Henry clamps onto her arms with an iron grip before she manages to break away from him, running back to the house in tears.

After going inside for lunch, the boys go back out to explore the town's old railyard, smash windows in an abandoned warehouse, and after the daytime watchman at the warehouse chases them away, they head off and wander into the town cemetery. There, Henry shows Mark a stash of cigarettes hidden in an old well, and starts asking him oddly morbid questions about his mother's death, angering Mark. For a time, they both look like they're going to fight, and Mark again sees a strange emptiness in his cousin's eyes, but Henry quickly puts on a disarming smile and they make up. Throughout the afternoon, they spend time on one of the local ponds, climb trees, and fire paintball guns at old beer cans. As the evening sets in, Henry leads Mark back to the tracks to flatten pennies, but when placing the them on the rails, he stands a bit too close to the passing train for comfort, mildly unnerving Mark. The trick works, and they collect their prizes before heading home for dinner.

The next morning after breakfast, the boys head back out to railroad, this time to collect old metal rail spikes for one of Henry's projects. Finishing this, they set out across town for the house, and while crossing a pedestrian bridge in-town, what appears to be guard dog of sorts, a mid-size German Shepherd wearing only a dark brown leather collar, chases them across the bridge. A convenient gate at the end of the walkway narrowly keeps the growling and snarling animal at bay; Henry stares it down in a rather puzzling fashion that sends the dog slinking off, tail between its legs. Despite his growing unease, Mark follows Henry into the family's old garage in the woods near the house, where Henry unveils his latest project and purpose of the rail spikes: what he calls 'the spikebow', a custom-made device resembling a scoped crossbow. The first test appears successful to Mark, but to Henry, who was trying to hit a nearby cat and instead hit a tree, the sight "...isn't quite right yet." After lunch, Mark heads off to see Alice Davenport at her home/office and confesses his belief that he let his mom die. That night, he has a dream about hearing his mother's voice but not knowing where it was coming from; after waking from the dream, he thinks he sees his mother walking by the room and follows her downstairs, only to find that it's Susan checking her laptop. Mark practically collapses where he is on the stairs, crestfallen, and comes to rest on the bottom landing, where a compassionate Susan embraces the weeping boy and comforts him, Wallace silently watching from outside his study, and a jealous Henry from the hall above, wishing for her to stop.

As another day dawns, Mark finds himself embarrassed in Susan's presence at breakfast, but he somehow finds a kindred spirit in his aunt, not unlike his mother's. After finishing his breakfast Mark decides to help Connie with a puzzle, but before they can finish, Henry interrupts and drags the reluctant Mark away from a now-tearful and angry Connie. Their destination is a rocky, tree-lined ridge overlooking the pedestrian bridge the dog chased them across; there, they 'dig in' and assemble the spikebow for another test. Mark suggests a small rock outcropping under the bridge as a target, and then a sign on the bridge, but Henry rejects both ideas and instead targets a dog crossing the bridge, the same dog that'd chased them the previous day. His sights now honed, Henry fires and hits the dog. It falters at first, trailing blood, and then collapses, tries to regain its footing, and fails before finally dying. A disturbingly fascinated and calm Henry suddenly produces a roll of canvas, pulling a shocked Mark to where the dog is lying in a pool of blood, and there he rolls the dog's body up in the canvas, convincing Mark to help him dispose of 'the evidence'. They heft the heavy, now-bloodstained canvas through the woods and into the cemetery, and dump it into the well. Disgusted, Mark sets out for home, while Henry stands at the rim of the well, humming 'Taps' in a mock funeral for the dead animal.

Back at the house, a few hours later and following lunch, a bored Mark starts looking through old photos around the living room and finds one of himself and his mom, dated October 1983. As he reminiscences about his mom, Susan notices and accidentally startles the boy, causing him to knock several photos onto the floor and become profusely apologetic to Susan as she joins him in retrieving the fallen pictures. She lets Mark know that his mother was well-liked and loved, only reaffirming Mark's bond with her; he also lays eyes on a photo of Richard (Rory Culkin), still a rather touchy subject for Susan. As with Connie the day before, Henry interrupts, and again drags Mark away, announcing "something top secret", a fact that rather amuses his mother. Back out in the garage, Henry introduces Mark to 'Mr. Highway', a homemade dummy. He promises Mark "...something amazing, something [he'll] you'll never forget..." if he agrees to help with Henry's latest plan. Mark reluctantly agrees, admittedly going against his better judgment, but figuring that whatever his cousin has planned couldn't possibly be as bad as what happened to the dog. Together, they lug the dummy through the woods and end up at an essentially deserted overpass of I-795 (an offshoot of I-95 to the northwest), where the boys rest the dummy against the safety railing, all the time with Mark distracted by his first snowfall. That distraction is rather short lived, however, as Henry makes up a short story of why Mr. Highway is suicidal (divorce, kids running away, house burning down, and car getting stolen), and yells out "Say goodbye!" before throwing the dummy over the rail and into the road below. A horrified Mark is helpless to do anything as, one after the other, ten cars are caught in a nearly disastrous pileup, though fortunately, no one is killed.

The boys quickly flee the overpass and duck into a nearby empty culvert to hide from the approaching Rock Harbor PD. Once the cars pass, Mark enters a heated argument with his cousin, confronting him; Henry merely feigns innocence and begins to implicate Mark in the matter as well, not to mention admitting he enjoyed watching the highway disaster. Mortified by what he's hearing, Mark leaves Henry behind in the culvert and heads for home yet again, not believing he'd been tricked for a second time. That night, back at home, Mark hears the small flatscreen TV on in the kitchen, with local news reporting on the accident, putting to rest any doubts that someone might have been killed - only minor injuries were reported. When Mark, guilt-ridden over the whole afternoon, tries going to Wallace to explain the situation, Henry intercepts him just outside the study and again tries to implicate his cousin, unnerving Mark enough that he decides not to talk with Wallace and instead races upstairs to Henry's room. Henry plants the first seeds of doubt about Mark in his father's mind when he tells him that "...Mark's been acting weird lately. I better go see if he's okay." He does go upstairs to see Mark, but instead, begins to gloat at and taunt him. Not a minute later, an exuberant Connie races in to tell them Susan gave her permission to stay up late that night. Henry responds by 'reminding' her that she isn't allowed into his room, and then by pulling on her hair and gripping her shoulders so hard she begins to cry. Henry's harsh reprimand is cut short as Mark grabs him by the throat, tearing him away from Connie and slamming him into the wall. A briefly startled Henry quickly accepts this a challenge and pries his cousin's grip away from his throat; they both grab fistfuls of the other's hair and pull as hard as possible. Connie witnesses everything and runs out, yelling for Susan. A brief argument in which Henry again taunts Mark is ended as Susan comes in, and Henry instantly puts on his best face for his mom, using both that and Mark's uncertainty to convince her that they were only playing a game. That night, Mark suffers a nightmare, one, for the life of him, he can't recall.

To be continued...

Cast

 * Macaulay Culkin as Henry Evans
 * Elijah Wood as Mark Evans
 * Mary Steenburgen as Susan Evans
 * David Morse as Jack Evans
 * Daniel Hugh Kelly as Wallace Evans
 * Jacqueline Brookes as Alice Davenport
 * Jamie Renée Smith as Connie Evans
 * Linda Hamilton as Janice Evans
 * Rory Culkin as Richard Evans (photographic/home movie cameo)

Development
The film began as a screenplay written by Ian McEwan for 20th Century Fox in 1986, but ended up 'floating' around the major film studios for a nearly a year before anyone took serious notice. That someone was independent producer Mary Anne Page, (an admirer of McEwan's work) who took an instant liking to the script, and tried for over three years to get it into production, without success. However, with the enormous success of Home Alone, Fox reconsidered the idea of the film, and following the big Orion Pictures' thriller The Silence of the Lambs, they realized that a radical new type of thriller was possible. With that, Fox gave the go-ahead, and attached director Michael Lehmann from the beginning, along with Page, co-producer Laurence Mark, and McEwan for further adaption and revision of the screenplay.

By mid-1991, the part of the mother (Susan Evans) had been filled by veteran actress Mary Steenburgen, but the studio was still looking for the two leading roles (Mark and Henry), and was strongly considering a pair of relative unknowns to fill them. Out of desperation to that end, Lehmann gave in to the studio and agreed to send a copy of the latest screenplay to Home Alone, and more importantly, Baja star Macaulay Culkin that September. Despite his newer image as 'America's favorite kid' from the previous year, the Fox studios sought to capitalize on the boy's prior - and still fairly strong - image as "the demon kid of the Southwest", possibly attracting fans of Baja as well. Culkin took a liking to the concept, and signed on for the role of Henry in November. He had originally been slated to start filming for Home Alone II around the same time, but following financial troubles on that end, filming was delayed until May 1992. Lehmann, however, was initially reluctant to fully engage him in the role, having strongly suggested a more powerful and 'complex' person for the character to McEwan and the casting staff. McEwan, on the other hand, believed that Culkin's casting could open more opportunities to exploit, such as his character adaptability, growing fame, and the potentially larger budget he could bring to the project. Lehmann reluctantly agreed with McEwan and set the boy to work.

The project's growing budget and now, fewer time constraints, meant that production quickly swung into full-gear in late December, with the roles of Jack (Mark's father) and Wallace (Henry's father) being filled by David Morse and Daniel Hugh Kelly, respectively. The better scheduling also enabled the casting of the last major role - Mark - with a relative unknown, but considered to be a rising star: Elijah Wood. His only notable prior roles were as a young boy in the Back to the Future, Part II 2015 café, and Huck Finn in New Line's 1990 film Finn, heavily based on Mark Twain's classic novel. Wood and Culkin would again meet on the film stage for the production of Baja II in 1996: Culkin in his signature role of Mark Bardmann and Wood as Louis Bardmann, the second son of Mark's older brother Simon.

Reception
The film was generally well-received by critics and moviegoers alike, and currently holds a rating of 78/100 (Decent/Good) on WebCritic, based on 150 reviews written in the interim since late 1992. Revenue from US and international theaters grossed nearly $227 million in total. Worldwide DVD and blu-disc sales have since added another $157 million to that total.

Trivia

 * The Evans family owns a DeLorean V-2/E minivan, but the vehicle wasn't yet in commercial production when the film was made, though by the time period the film is set in (December 1993), V-2's and V-2/E's were in full production. The film crew created the family van from photos released by DMC in their "All-Electric Reveal" in early 1991 and by modifying a 1992 model V-1. It was, visually, inside and out, almost identical to the real-life V-2/E.

Novels
Main Article: The Good Son novels

Two years following the film, Ben Corrin released the first literary sequel, entitled The Good Son: No Fair. The first follow-up, Imperfect One, was released in 1996, while the third, Time to Live, is set to be released in early 1998. Last on Mars author Elijah Lane has conceived a second series - entitled Another Way, though he believes it will be several years before it will be published. Corrin and Lane have collaborated to write a 'novel of opposites', Spin 180, in which Mark and Henry's roles are reversed. It was published earlier this year.

Television
Main Article: The Good Son TV series

Concurrent with the release of the first novel in 1994, the film's producer, Mary Anne Page, managed to sell 20th Century on a television series that follows the exact plotline of the novels. The cast from the film returned for the series, though Jack Morse and Macaulay Culkin were relegated to guest roles for the duration. The second season introduced Jack Martinsburg (Billy Burke), an FBI Special Agent from the Falmouth field office assigned to investigate the Evans family. The third season just recently concluded, and a spring 1997 renewal means that the series is currently scheduled to enter its fourth season this coming fall (September 12).