This Boy's Life

This Boy's Life was Leonardo DiCaprio’s first major screen appearance, one from which he never looked back. Although he is playing 15 year-old he was 19 at the time but barely looks a day over 14, even later in the movie when he is supposed to have aged to 18.

The film is based on the memoirs of Tobias Wolff (DiCaprio), an eventual Syracuse University professor , who had a difficult childhood growing up with a single mother, Caroline (Ellen Barkin) and her abusive boyfriend, Roy (Chris Cooper), and later a husband, Dwight (Robert DeNiro). 

Although the dramatic heft of the film is overwhelmed by its overly tidy execution, with more attention being given to period detail than developing the characters, fortunately DiCaprio’s trademark combination of surface toughness and raw vulnerability makes Toby a winning character whilst Ellen Barkin does surprisingly well as his mother, not the kind of role for which she is known, although she gets sidelined as the film progresses. 

Whether because of the script, Caton-Jones direction or something else Robert DeNiro is far less convincing, switching from hail-fellow-well-met to bully and back again, quite arbitrarily as Dwight slowly is consumed by his demons, his character never really striking true as either a psychological portrait or a product of his times, a fundamental feature of the story. DeNiro plays him more like a domestic Al Capone, paternal one minute, out-of-control monster the next, with the story's key motive, the Oedipal relationship between Toby, his mother and Dwight getting insufficient attention,

Notwithstanding its formulaic aspects, This Boy’s Life is a story to which many people of that generation will be able to relate and thus the film lends itself to a good degree of emotional investment.

 

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