About a Boy (2002)

Will Freeman has solved the problem of modern existence. He has money (a dead father who wrote a Christmas novelty song; royalties come in forever), no job, no obligations, and no relationships that require anything of him. He rates his days by the quality of television watched and the ease with which he disposes of women he does not love. He is, he cheerfully admits, an island. Then Nick Hornby's novel -- and the Weitz brothers' crisp 2002 adaptation of it -- sends a twelve-year-old boy crashing onto his shores, and the whole comfortable arrangement falls apart.

About a Boy is a better film than its premise suggests. A rich bachelor befriending a socially awkward kid sounds like the setup for something mawkish, the sort of film where a child teaches a man to live again and everyone learns something. What the Weitz brothers actually made is sharper than that: a comedy about two people who are both emotionally stunted, propping each other up out of pure self-interest, until they are not.

Hugh Grant's Best Performance, Quietly

There is a version of Will Freeman that Hugh Grant could have coasted through. He had built a career on charming, self-deprecating awkwardness. What he does here is subtler. Will is not awkward; he is deliberately insulated. Grant plays the vacancy behind the ease, the specific emptiness of someone who has designed his life with great care to mean nothing.

The film was shot primarily in London in 2001, mostly in Clerkenwell and Maida Vale, with the production adding a purpose-built facade to a building on St James Walk to serve as Will's flat. The flat itself is important: it is the visual argument for Will's life. Everything in it is expensive. Nothing in it is used.

Grant earned a Golden Globe nomination for the role and was named Best British Actor by the London Film Critics Circle. He has said it is among the work he is most proud of. For a man whose public image was defined by bumbling romantic leads, playing someone genuinely cold was a kind of liberation.

Nicholas Hoult at Twelve

Marcus, the boy Will reluctantly adopts, is played by Nicholas Hoult in his first major film role. He was twelve years old during production. The performance is startling not because it is technically accomplished, though it is, but because Hoult finds something real in a character who could easily tip into caricature: the strange kid, the bully bait, the boy with the depressed mother who sings to himself in public without any apparent awareness of the social consequences.

Toni Collette plays that mother, Fiona, a role that requires her to be genuinely difficult: earnest, suffocating, well-meaning in all the wrong ways. She earned a BAFTA nomination for it. Rachel Weisz plays Rachel, the woman Will begins to care about for the first time in his adult life, which he finds deeply inconvenient.

The Christmas Concert Scene

The film builds toward a school Christmas concert where Marcus, in a fit of misguided emotional logic, decides to sing "Killing Me Softly with His Song" to cheer up his mother. The boy accompanying him on recorder loses his nerve and disappears. Marcus stands alone on stage in front of a room full of children who already hate him, and starts singing.

He is, objectively, terrible. The crowd turns.

Will walks in from the wings with a guitar.

It is one of those movie moments that works entirely because of what has come before it. The scene is funny and excruciating and oddly moving, not because the singing improves significantly, but because the act of showing up is what matters. Will Freeman, who has never shown up for anything, shows up. Directors Paul and Chris Weitz let it breathe. They do not overscore it or cut away from the discomfort too quickly.

The scene also serves Will's other purpose: Rachel is in the audience, and seeing him protect Marcus changes her assessment of him completely. Which means Will's act of generosity is still, at some level, self-serving. The film is honest about that. It does not pretend he becomes a saint.

Is This Actually a Christmas Movie?

The film is not set during Christmas. It spans roughly a year in Will and Marcus's lives, autumn through to the following Christmas. But the holiday does real structural work. Will's entire income derives from "Santa's Super Sleigh," a novelty Christmas song his father wrote in the 1950s. Christmas money has kept Will comfortable and unaccountable his entire adult life. The irony is not subtle, and Hornby intended it that way.

The Christmas concert is not incidental. It is the scene where every character's arc resolves, and it takes place at Christmas because Christmas is the season when you cannot remain neutral about people. You either show up or you do not. For Will Freeman, it turns out, that choice was harder than he thought and more important than he planned.

The film earned $130.5 million worldwide against a $30 million budget, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and holds a 93% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. None of those numbers explain why it works. It works because it is about two people who cannot fix each other but manage, through proximity and stubborn affection, to fix themselves a little. The Christmas concert is where that happens, on a small school stage, in front of a crowd of bored children, with a guitar and a song nobody asked for.