Lad Meets Boy, Grows Up

No man is an island." Don't even try to put John Donne's pretty, if by now somewhat threadbare, metaphor over on Hugh Grant's Will. Perfectly self-absorbed and perfectly content with that condition, he has pretty much convinced himself that, actually, every man is an island. Long ago, his father wrote one of those awful, seasonally ubiquitous Christmas songs, and Will has lived on the royalties ever since, never holding a job, never marrying, never doing anything with his life but shooting pool, getting his hair done and chasing babes. As islands go, he thinks he's Ibiza, where the emotional climate is languid but you can always find a disco to jump-start a night that looks as if it might loom a little too long.

Ever in search of needy, complaisant women, Will even answers phones for an Amnesty International telethon as a way of chatting up female callers. Eventually Will observes that single moms may be the most desperate demographic of all. So he devises a new scam. Pretending to be a single dad (which, naturally, entails having a pretend child), he joins S.P.A.T. (Single Parents, Alone Together) and gets less and more than he bargained for. There's only one attractive woman to hit on, but she introduces him, via a picnic, to her best pal's son Marcus (a marvelously uncute Nicholas Hoult). He's bullied at school, and his mom (Toni Collette) is a mess, clinging to an outmoded hippie lifestyle and suicidally inclined. The kid sees in detached and manipulative Will a surrogate father whose isolation matches his own. Maybe together they can mobilize themselves and join the human race.

Marcus insinuates himself into Will's life. And About a Boy, which starts out as a cool, gently exaggerated farce (and never loses that antic spirit), begins to insinuate itself into our souls. Hugh Grant shares with the immortal Cary an ability to go dark and distracted on us without losing our sympathy for his eager, morally educable side. This talent helps to ground a comedy that includes, among other things, a carelessly murdered duck, a funnily murdered rendition of Killing Me Softly With His Song and a distinctly unmerry vegetarian Christmas party. But the film is always true to the lonesome realities of modern urban — in this case, London — life, which means its humor never seems forced or merely frivolous.

That our laughter has a real, painful subtext is all the more surprising in that Nick Hornby's novel was adapted (with Peter Hedges) and directed by Chris and Paul Weitz, they of the raucous American Pie. Who knew these guys had sense and sensibility? But they do — and About a Boy is far and away the smartest, funniest and most winsome big-studio release of this so-far dismal year.