Avoiding The Cutes

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: KING OF THE HILL

WRITER AND DIRECTOR: STEVEN SODERBERGH

THE BOTTOM LINE: A strong-minded look at a hard-luck life, reserved and truthful in the telling.

We encounter Aaron Kurlander (Jesse Bradford), 12, reading a paper to his school class in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1933. It's a very persuasive fantasy in which he imagines Charles Lindbergh calling him for advice on what food to take on his transatlantic solo flight. The boy suggests that cheese sandwiches are always good.

In that sequence Steven Soderbergh, working territory far removed from his sex, lies, and videotape, efficiently reveals the sweet blend of imagination and practicality that animates his principal character and the sympathetic yet unsentimental approach with which he will recount his subsequent adventures.

For Aaron will soon be soloing himself. First his younger brother (Cameron Boyd) is sent off to relatives so that the family can save money. Next his mother enters a tuberculosis sanatorium. Finally his father hits the road selling watches -- the only job he can get in the Depression. That leaves Aaron, who hides his survivor's wit under a deadpan demeanor, to fend for himself in the shabby hotel where the declassed Kurlanders have washed up.

The kid has much to contend with: a hotel management that wants to evict him, a slimily threatening bellhop, the sadistic cop on the beat, not to mention the dawning mysteries of sex and some sudden deaths and dislocations among his friends. The wary reserve of Bradford's performance has a crystalline quality in which you can read in his response to his father's bluster and mother's passivity. You sense in him a future manliness that will avoid both modes.

Soderbergh's adaptation of A.E. Hotchner's novel-memoir is episodic, and that mutes the melodrama inherent in Aaron's encounters with crime, illness and loss. Aaron must improvise his response to events without fully understanding them, and that comes closer to the truth about boyhood than most movies do. It was a directorial mistake to bathe the images in a soft glow. But that visual error is not compounded psychologically. The film has a tough core, and in a time when movies about the troubles of little boys are a sentimental subgenre and dysfunction is being too easily overcome, there is something exemplary about this smart little movie.