Roomie and I saw Saint Ralph tonight at the only non-chain movie theater in town. It’s been a long time since I was so captivated by a movie that I didn’t care if anyone saw me tear up or caught me whispering quietly at the screen. I usually spend a lot of time examining the ceiling tiles during sad movies and making fun of people who talk to the characters during all movies.
It was either the saddest comedy or the funniest tragedy I’ve ever seen. Ralph Walker (Adam Butcher) is a 14-year-old Catholic School boy whose dad is dead and whose mother is in a coma. When a Nietzsche-quoting priest (Campbell Scott, acting just wise and tough and compassionate enough to distract me with gleefully impure thoughts) takes him onto his Catholic school’s cross-country team, he decides winning the Boston Marathon will be just the miracle the doctors say his mom needs to wake up. Despite the obligatory obstacles – a curmudgeonly Monsignor, a house burned to the ground – and setbacks, Ralph believes he can win because, as he states simply and without even the merest hint of self pity, he doesn’t want to be an orphan. My heart nearly shattered out of my ribcage. I know kids always act circles around the self-conscious adults in any film, but Adam Butcher’s performance was extraordinarily natural and frank. He played the lovable weirdo with unadorned conviction and complete abandon. The scene at the end of the race, although rendered a bit clichéd by slow-motion, can only be described as bitterly resonant.
I got fidgety toward the end of the movie, afraid the director would take the easy way out and ruin the warm, human raggedness of the tale by tacking on a too-neat ending. I need not have worried. It ended the only way it could have; with me wishing I were 14 again so I could have a crush on the courageous, charismatic, completely unassuming Saint Ralph.
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