I did my senior project in college on a work that is actually a spiritual ancestor of this film!

Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son concerns a Victorian youth growing up as a member of what is most likely the Plymouth Bretheren, an extremely Puritan sect. The difficult circumstances of his birth lead the Bretheren to regard him as an especially holy, consecrated child and his strict (yet oddly, natural scientist) father to raise him with even greater strictness than usual. Alas, lil Gosse winds up being seduced by the blandishments of mainline Christianity and, later, the literary world, and grew up to be a well-known critic and literary gossip—and inventor of a whole new form of writing biography.

Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda sort of picked up this same narrative, transplanting it to Australia and throwing in gambling, a glass factory and a girl. The film with Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett captures some of this flavor but the book goes into much greater depth.

These are two works that are very dear to my heart, to which I now add, strangely, well, this one.

The boy hero of Son of Rambow is being raised under similar circumstances to those of Gosse and Oscar (except by his widowed mother instead of a widower father) in 1980s Britain and this time instead of the Anglican church or the gambling den it is the VCR that leads him from his path. Well, the VCR and a chronic discipline problem who, naturally, becomes his best friend.

This line of descent amused me well enough, but… it’s not nearly the source of the charm of this film. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve seen in ages (I can’t believe this is made by the same guys responsible for that colossal dud of a feature version of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy), very imaginitive (the animated dream sequence in which the little 11-year-old hero is furnished with a full set of bulging rubber muscles is worth the rental alone) and, yes, slightly heartwarming, it just can’t be helped.

This film gets compared to, or at least mentioned in the same breath with, Be Kind Rewind only because both concern people making their own, low-budget and goofy versions of “classic” films, but Son of Rambow is by far the better film. From flying dogs to broken families to nail scissors up the nose, there’s something for everybody!

I laughed, I cried, I had sudden urges to tie things around my head.

Son of Rambow is basically a buddy flick with two kids: angel and demon. The space where they connect is pure contagious fantasy and it makes each of them more real. The children’s acting is exuberant and honest, the visuals are euphoric, and most scenes prompted rolls of laughter. Way too much fun to pass up.