Stars: Paul Franklin Dano, Bruce Altman, Billy Kay, James Costa, Brian Cox, Brian Cox, Marcia DeBonis, Tony Donnelly, Adam Lefevre, Walter Masterson

Director: Michael Cuesta

Summary: Howie, a fifteen-year-old boy starts to spend too much time with his delinquent friends after his mother dies. When Howie meets Big John, an ex-marine, he discovers a secret that connects them to each other...

The Long Island Expressway, the highway that traverses suburban Long Island with its "lanes moving east, lanes moving west, and lanes that go straight to hell" serves as the central metaphor in this disturbing meditation on coming of age and teenage vulnerability. Howie Blitzer (Brian Cox) is a sensitive fifteen-year-old who runs with a rough crowd. The recent death of his mother (in a car accident on exit 52 of the L.I.E.) and his father's indifference to it, have left him floating in a world bubbling over with sex, violence, and danger. When his best friend Gary convinces Howie to burglarize the house of their neighbor, 60-year-old Big John, the tenuous balance of their teenage existence is entirely thrown off. To make matters even worse, Howie's father is arrested over a bad business deal. Howie is left dangling, and only Big John seems to care. A harrowing mixture of tenderness and perversion electrifies the father-son relationship that forms between Howie and Big John. Director Michael Cuesta's touching vision of domestic life in modern-day suburbia is at once humorous and unnerving as it boldly charts one boy's convoluded path through adolescence.

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L.I.E.features quietly electrifying performances from newcomer Paul Franklin Dano and criminally underrated veteran Brian Cox (best known on the big screen as the original Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter), as a neglected teenager and his paedophile acquaintance respectively.

Fifteen-year-old Howie derives no support from the inept parenting of his widower father and instead seeks solace and companionship firstly with a group of delinquent burglar friends and subsequently with the former marine Big John, whose complex makeup--part father-figure, part Fagin, part Svengali, part abuser--leads Howie into an ambivalent relationship in which there are no easy answers or straightforward notions of right and wrong. The premise of the movie is thrown into sharp relief by the cosy New Jersey setting, all neatly-manicured lawns and cool interiors. Indeed, the most striking images in the film are the burglary scenes, in which Howie's furtive, awkward presence in the sterile blandness of his victims' uncluttered homes forms a double-edged metaphor for both the security and the anodyne mediocrity of the society from which he feels so alienated. --Roger Thomas

Aspect Ratio:	Anamorphic Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 0
Special Features:	Star And Director Filmographies, Scene Selection, Ali Catterall Film Notes, Deleted Scene, Audio Commentary From Director Michael Cuesta And Actor Brian Cox, Original Theatrical Trailer
Year:	2002
Release Date:	April 28, 2003
Runtime:	95 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	T V D 3403
Keywords:	General, Lie, Wide, Screen, I, Drama, E, L
Genre:	Drama