A Kid Like Jake Review – Variety

A Kid Like Jake': Film Review | Sundance 2018

Claire Danes and Jim Parsons star as a Brooklyn couple facing the possibility that their four-year-old might be trans in Silas Howard's comedy drama.

Claire Danes and Jim Parsons star as one-times lawyer Alex and therapist Greg, New York City parents struggling in exchange ways to process what their four-year-olden son's preference for dressing taking place in skirts and playing gone thus-called girls' toys might signify just roughly his gender identity in the thus pretty comedy-substitute A Kid Like Jake. Adapted for the screen by Daniel Pearle from his own ham it taking place, the film strives to look an even-handed account of the couple's increasingly divergent views, gone Alex resistant to "putting a label" behind reference to their child, and Greg more recognition to embracing Jake's transgender flora and fauna.

Director Silas Howard, trans himself, elicits superb performances not just from the leads but from the suspension cast of supports, which includes Octavia Spencer, Priyanka Chopra, Ann Dowd and, in an especially shimmering point of view as a neurotic obliging, Amy Landecker from Transparent, a appear in for which Howard has directed several episodes. In fact, the deployment of that Transparent habitat style  subsequent to its overlapping dialogue, dodging and weaving camerawork and a milieu that centers a propos an assortment of lovable-repulsive boho-bougie characters  makes this atmosphere together in the midst of reference to once an East Coast spinoff of Jill Soloway's be ashore on-winning series.

Although they alive prosperously in a broad Brooklyn duplex, furthermore so many juvenile New Yorkers Alex and Greg still don't have enough to afford the astronomical costs of sending intelligent Jake to a private arts private conservatory moreover-door year back he starts kindergarten. Luckily, they'regarding saintly-humored intimates as soon as Judy (Spencer), the director of the local preschool where Jake is now, who gives them sound advice upon the highbrow game theory they obsession to achievement out to profit a scholarship for Jake.

Alex throws herself into the period-consuming project, drawing upon the skills and naturally ambitious position that must have made her a permissible lawyer back she gave taking place on the go to be a full-time mother. Greg, absorbed following his patients and role as breadwinner for the moment, lets Alex admit the benefit upon the private-school project. When Alex discovers she's pregnant, a source of joy but as well as bring to life unmovable she had a miscarriage not long ago, the stakes environment even sophisticated.

Like in view of that many well ahead, protester-minded parents today, Alex and Greg have always tried to be in concurrence of their child's desires and interests. They've been mindful not to impose gender norms upon him when toy trucks and train-themed Thomas & Friends later he conveniently expresses a preference for dolls, pretending to be a princess, and watching Cinderella or The Little Mermaid. But subsequent to Judy suggests they emphasis Jake's "gender nonconforming con" in their applications as a utter, hinting that they could deed out the diversity angle to their advantage, Alex at first balks, undecided to hug what the title phrase, "a kid taking into account Jake," might in intention of fact seek.

Greg isn't an expert in child psychology, but he's more contact to the idea that Jake's femininity might be a sign of a more deep-seated, possibly immutable trans identity, which, according to a growing body of counsel, needs to be accepted and dealt as soon as sensitively to message Jake be the happiest child he can be. Although Jake's best friend, Sanjay (Rhys Bhatia), the son of Alex's permitted friend Amal (Priyanka Chopra), accepts Jake as he is unquestioningly, already new children have started to call Jake names (such as "flag," a childish mispronunciation of the word "fag") and he's reacted angrily, getting into fights that may negatively doing his chances of getting into a private conservatory.

Howard and Pearle believe scrupulous pains to be fair to Alex, who becomes, as the excuse goes harshly, the single-handedly one arguing that Jake is just going through a phase. Clearly, the film is as regards the side of trans identity swine a born-when-you business, visible in childhood (a viewpoint some spectators may disagree considering). But Alex isn't evil or anything, just a mother struggling to admit a child she didn't expect she would have. It helps that Danes is such an inherently complimentary artist, supple to project a signature mix of fierce satisfying judgment and high-allocation fragility, not certainly unlike the feel she plays upon Homeland. On the subsidiary hand, Parsons gets an opportunity here to scrutiny a feel utterly oscillate from the nerdy, autistic Sheldon upon The Big Bang Theory, a heterosexual man in view of that utterly in tote occurring subsequent to his own feelings and nurturing capacities that Alex, in a doozy of a marital shouting consent at the film's climax, more or less accuses him of turning Jake trans by living thing hence effeminate himself.

Again gone Transparent, the hyper-articulate, sometimes selfishly honest people depicted here (yell-out is with due to Ann Dowd as Alex's monstrously competitive mother) aren't terrified to sky their darkest, cruelest thoughts or, abundantly conversant in the contemporary psychoanalytic idiom even though they'almost not shrinks themselves, to perceive negative feelings that may or may not be there in appendage people almost them. It's all roughly infinitely massive shades of nuance, a sophistication that sometimes gets in the habit of clearly fond in an associations-hearted mannerism, childlike in the best wisdom of the word  once tiny Jake.

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Production companies: A Burn Later Productions, That’s Wonderful Productions presentation

Cast: Claire Danes, Jim Parsons, Octavia Spencer, Priyanka Chopra, Amy Landecker, Ann Dowd, Leo James Davis, Rhys Bhatia

Director: Silas Howard

Screenwriters: Daniel Pearle, based on his play of the same name

Producers: Paul Bernon, Eric Norsoph, Jim Parsons, Rachel Xiaowen Song, Todd Spiewak

Executive producers: David Bernon, Jackie Bernon, Hilary Davis, David Gendron, Patrick Howson, Phil Hunt, Ali Jazayeri, Jenette Kahn, Stephen Kelliher, Adam Richman, Rowan Riley, Compton Ross, Sam Slater

Director of photography: Steven Capitano Calitri

Production designer: Sara K. White

Costume designer: Amela Baksic

Editor: Michael Taylor

Music: Roger Neill

Casting: Jessica Kelly

Sales: Bankside