It is not unfair to look upon the story being told in Azazel Jacobs's new film Terri on paper and groan heavily -- if not tear off your clothes, curl up in a fetal position, and cry from sheer exhaustion. The 39-year-old Jacobs's sixth film concerns the titular overweight outsider (Jacob Wysocki) as he is taken under wing by his friendly, odd, and oddly honest vice principal, Mr. Fitzgerald (the great John C. Reilly), following a string of homeroom tardies and general anti-social behavior. His home life with his dementia-ridden uncle (Creed Bratton of The Office) is weird, to say the least; he has a crush on a popular, damaged but essentially kind-hearted girl, Heather (Olivia Crocicchia); the only people he could possibly call his friends are Chad (Bridger Zadina), an outlandish deviant suffering from trichotillomania, and Mr. Fitzgerald. The funk of presaged, quirk-heavy familiarity is enough to make one pass out -- which makes Jacobs's sublime triumph all the more surprising and riveting. This is a clear sign of a major film artist breaking through the chrysalis. Jacobs himself has spoken of the film as a break from the personal storytelling of his previous feature, the superb Momma's Man, though it doesn't seem that this has affected his highly intimate style. Even so, it's hard not to see the significance of Terri's jolly, energetic stroll through the woods in the morning, freed from the cluttered environs of his uncle's house, which is something like the loft the "hero" of Momma's Man shared with his parents transplanted to a Los Angeles suburb. Teased at school for his "double d's" and his habit for wearing matching pajamas to school, Terri finds solace in the freedom and power of nature, never so much as when he witnesses a hawk devour a dead mouse. Out there he is a king; in school, he is one of Mr. Fitzgerald's "monsters," an unsettling term Terri uses for the outcasts and special-needs kids that the vice principal pencils in for personal time during the week. He feels isolated, weirder than ever, and Fitzgerald's attempts to paint it over with a few white lies and a speech about "good hearts" only make matters worse.
Jacobs embeds his film with pathos which blends beautifully with the film's robust humor, which can be attributed to both Patrick deWitt's witty, nuanced screenplay (based on his own short stories) and Jacobs's deft work with his talented cast. The humor derives from the inherent innocence and gentleness of our lumbering hero, contrasted against the cynicism, wisdom, hormones, and discipline he encounters at school. Heather's near-immediate fall from grace, precipitated by her willingness to get fingered publicly by a boy in home economics, is followed immediately by a scene in which the boy holds out his still-moist fingers for Terri to sniff. The scene is inherently raunchy, but Jacobs handles it with a sense of sincere discovery that befits the tenderness that Terri exudes. It's the same tenderness that everyone but Terri withholds from Heather when she returns to school and is essential to the friendship that blossoms between the two outcasts and, to a lesser extent, between Terri and Chad.
What is perhaps most striking about Jacobs's film is how perfectly he pitches it between waking life and real life, with Terri as his oversized Little Nemo and the dreadful age of maturity galloping towards him like a wild, haunted steed. The death of Mr. Fitzgerald's secretary, for example, begets a stirring speech about the small horrors and mediocre triumphs of adulthood, which Reilly delivers with his patented shaggy dog honesty. It's told by a man who has been disappointed by life, but the essential message is that of understanding, of doing your own thing while trying to tolerate what other people do.
Terri's relationships with Heather and Chad are on uncertain ground by the end, but his friendship with Mr. Fitzgerald survives and promises respite. Terri's wonderment at such small pleasures as nailing a hook shot gives Fitzgerald hope, even in the face of his troubled marriage, and Jacobs harnesses that delirious sweetness without stumbling into sentimentality. This is to say that despite its narrative pedigree, which strikes the difference between John Hughes and Good Will Hunting, the film's hazy, transcendent beauty and distinct artistry reclaim the rote set-up. Jacobs has stated that the film was born out of both his love for and experience in independent cinema (his father is the brilliant avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs) and the early influence of the late Hughes's films. In Terri, we can see those two forces within the titular, lovable oddball: The struggle and yearning for acceptance, and the need to be the singular self. And for once, the two forces do not collide, but rather intertwine and meld, the result of which is a deeply humane comedy that touches the ethereal. It's one of the few outright masterpieces that have graced the cinema thus far this year.
