James White (Josh Mond, 2015): USA

Reviewed by: Cameron Krul. Viewed at the AFI Fest 2015.

The sudden loss of one parent and the looming death of another set the stage for “James White,”.Mond’s fraught portrait of a mother and son in crisis sports a pair of knockout performances by Cynthia Nixon and, Christopher Abbott, and a vivid feel for wayward New York youths cocooned by upper-middle-class privilege, but little in the way of redemptive creature comforts.

James White is a story about a caring son who is struggling to get his life together. He has to find a way to balance aiding his mother through the death of her ex husband, and help her with her failing health conditions while he is also trying to figure out his own life.

In the beginning of the film James comes off as a rude entitled brat, because he is scarred of facing reality, and is troubled by the idea of becoming an adult who has to take care of responsibility.Throughout the course of the movie you begin to see the real James who is a loving human being that loves his mom unconditionally, and acts as her care taker after it’s revealed that she has stage 4 cancer. His mom’s worsening health condition forces James to become an adult, and take responsibility for the first time in his life. The stress of his situation causes him to have a drunken mental breakdown in a hotel after a party, because he is deathly afraid of his mother passing away, and him having to truly learn how to live on his own and be his own man.