Terri

With Terri, we enter yet another very indie world of the loser that must be loved.  In this case it's a lonely, overweight high school student with a penchant for wearing pajamas at school, an odd fascination with the death of rodents and with an infatuation with the schools guidance counselor, played with aplomb, but without a point by John C. Rielly.  And that's pretty much the gist of Azazel Jacobs mawkish, self consciously condescending, slightly creepy and mostly tedious film.  The hero (anti-hero) of the story is a shy loner named Terri, played with almost too much restraint and lack of backbone by newcomer Jacob Wysocki, and from the start it feels as if the coming of age trails and terrains that the film intends to showcases are something out of science fiction, as he's a character too vague and inarticulate and foreign to feel relatable in any way.  Living in a small town with an invalid uncle, there's a sense that backstory isn't necessary in the space of cluttered art direction.  Alienated and unfocused at school, Terri begins an odd relationship with Rielly's guidance counselor, Mr. Fitzgerald, himself a strange and less than fully formed character, full of incidental quirks and little dimension.  There's slight peripheral story involving Mr. Fitzgerald's other misanthropic patients, an elderly and dying receptionist and a bad reputation girl that Terri bonds with, but little adds up to much at all-- it's all meandering dithering in search of a point.  The tone of Terri is what's striking and potentially the most interesting quality of the film at all-- not quite serious, not quite funny, but with a chilly aftertaste that the films characters are meant to be laughed at instead of with, a slight Napoleon Dynamite-esque effect of what's weird must be artful, and nasty revelation that an hour and forty minutes of ones life will never be returned.  D