The Book of Henry

This is the thinking person’s superhero film. Henry is a super-genius 11-year-old who does all the thinking, business and planning for his single mom Susan and helps raise kid brother Peter. No phone-booth transformations for this nerd, though, just the celebration of intelligence, knowledge and responsible citizenship. These days that’s a rare Marvel.

To Henry our greatest danger is not violence but apathy. When he senses that his next door classmate Christina is being abused by her stepfather Henry exhausts every normal avenue of reporting and intervention. To no avail, because the stepfather is a prominent figure on the police force with a brother high up in the social services command. 

Before dying of a brain tumour Henry prepares an amazingly detailed plan for his mother to kill abuser Glenn Sickleman. He documents Christina’s predicament and gives his mother a step-by-step program. It's a dead-serious variation on his earlier specialty, complicated Rube Goldberg contraptions. 

With such a precocious son Susan doesn’t have to be the standard issue Mom. While he’s poring over abstruse texts and manuals she plays violent video games, to his bemusement. She responds to Henry’s death by lapsing into childishness. For Peter she prepares three meals of desserts every day. 

When she undertakes Henry’s plan she grows up. After the pertinent institutions turn her away too, she plans Glenn’s assassination under the cover of the school’s student talent show, in effect undertaking to develop a new talent of her own. Hit Mom. 

The film backs away from that vigilante justice. That would be childish, Susan realizes. But the wheels Henry set in motion before dying save Christine anyway. When her sons’ photos distract Christina from her killing shot, she instead faces Sickleman and promises she will expose him. The school principal who couldn’t bend procedures to confront Sickleman is moved by the pain in Christina’s dance performance finally to file a formal, surprise complaint. This double exposure prompts Sickleman to kill himself, clearing the way for Susan to adopt Christina, admitting her to her unusual, loving and nurturing family.  
     For a film that deals with such horrors and that takes so many dramatic swerves of plot, this is a surprisingly cheery work. It revives the image of our lost America. There people look after each other. The social and government institutions can be roused to protect the helpless. The truth can be discovered under layers of lies and subterfuge. Why, people as well as our social institutions step forth to help the suffering. Those were the days — at least in films.
      And imagine -- an American commercial film that actually respects intelligence and knowledge. It's hero is a "brain." This during the cataclysmic reign of a president who proudly avowed "I love the poorly educated." And whose virtually every major cabinet appointment was to someone not just wholly unqualified for but actively antagonistic to the mandate and responsibilities of the office.