If you’ve seen the trailer for Turning Green (and I recommend that you do, if you’re at all worried about what you might be consuming with your R-rating-enabled entertainment), then you’ve seen a good share of the more salacious bits of the film… minus, of course, the actual breasts, of which there are several.  Believe it or not, the filmmakers mine some not indecent coming-of-age humor from the tale of a 15-year-old bookie’s aide who decides to freelance as a porn entrepreneur.

In the interests of full-disclosure, it’s probably worth noting that I spent more than two decades enslaved to a pornography addiction before being rather miraculously delivered from it by God.  I don’t find the subject of pornography at all amusing, generally speaking, and consider any mode of pay-for-sex to be socially destructive and morally suspect at the very least.  I am also not at all pleased by this decade’s trend of masturbation-as-entertainment—in everything from American Pie and You, Me and Dupree to Enemy at the Gates and Babel—to be base and demeaning.

So when my praise of Turning Green is tempered, you’ve got a pretty good idea of why; but when I say that I nonetheless found the film’s subjects, and its treatments of those subjects, to be realistic and amusing, you’ve also got to be assured that the film is free of Something About Mary yuks and mugging, and actually achieves something artistically and narratively distinctive.

Set in 1979 Ireland, the story concerns a pair of young Irish Americans expatriated because they have no choice but to be raised by their three dotty aunts.  James, the older, is the tale’s protagonist; he’s bent on returning to America by hook or by crook… mostly the latter.  So he apprentices with a stereotypically smooth yet strong-arming bookie to raise cash for his escape.  Younger brother Pete tags along as James scams what he can, even taking drinking bets.  “You’re green,” Pete informs his older brother after one such episode.  “I know,” James replies; and so do we.  You can take a kid out of Ireland, but, well, you know.  And you can take a kid out of America, too.

Filmmakers Michael Aimette and John G. Hofmann pack their script with enough PG-rated whimsey—such as dinner-table conversational charades with the boys’ stuttering aunt, James’ baiting of the family’s stereotypically hypocritical priest, the subtitles behind the the heavily-brogued banter of Colm Meaney’s bettor Tom, and a series of jokes about Pete’s incidental lisp—to keep the tone entertainingly light.  Just as James notes that he has “deep respect for a man who can work around an obstacle” (with respect to Pete’s creative avoidance of the letter S), I admire the way the directors dance around the central gag about James’ chronic, ahem, “constipation,” which keeps him in the bathroom (and bedroom) for curiously long spells.

But the film breaks down a little in stretching for high drama.  In the early-ish going, Bill the Bookie notes that the difference between James and Pete, despite identical circumstances, is that Pete is “a teeny bit happier” than his older brother.  “He’ll get over it” is the rejoinder of Bill the Breaker, the bookie’s right-fist man and enforcer.  And we can be pretty sure that James and the two Bills are headed for some kind of reckoning, with Pete somehow in the crosshairs.

It’s nice that the film doesn’t conclude in the most obvious of fashions; but I think the story would have been better served by more of a focus on Pete (at the expense of star billing, of course, as headliners Alessandro Nivola and Timothy Hutton play the Bookie and Breaker, respectively), particularly given the great setup of the younger characters in the earlier scenes.  By the time we reach the film’s climax, poor Pete has faded so much into the background that he almost seems an afterthought.

In the end, though, I was won over in spite of juvenile “Turning Japanese”-inspired porn-winkiness and the numerous cinematic punches pulled to avoid excessive violence (and added production expense, no doubt).  Aimette and Hofmann, both seasoned commercial directors and producers, have assembled a truly artistic product and experience with a low-budget (if not guerilla) approach.

At the very least, I think you’ll find that Donal Gallery makes a highly memorable debut as James, and will probably make you think of a young Michael Sheen.  The supporting performances are also fine, and the original music is well crafted.  Though the filmmakers focus an awful lot on faces and buildings, they also include enough landscapes to remind you that Ireland is beautiful.

If you’re looking for something unique (if not morally uplifting) in the way of R-rated coming-of-age stories, you’ll probably enjoy Turning Green.  In a way, it’s almost a low-budget two-bit-Irish-hood remake of Wall Street and about as cynical.

Turning Green is unrated, but I imagine you’ve already figured out this is R material.  To the producers’ credit, this has not at all been downplayed in trailers or promotional materials, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise.  Just don’t make the mistake of thinking this a good film for young brothers to watch, simply because it features a pair of young brothers.

Courtesy of a national publicist, Greg screened a promotional DVD of Turning Green.