Tadpole

Home from boarding school for Thanksgiving holiday with unruly hormones and a festering Oedipal jones for his fortysomething stepmom (Sigourney Weaver), idiosyncratic 15-year-old Manhattan sophisticate Oscar Grubman (newcomer Aaron Stanford) is versed in the classics, fluent in French, tortured by his own high expectations, and has little interest in girls his own age. But as he waits impatiently for some elusive perfect moment to reveal his desires to dad's wife, Oscar gets a little drunk one night and goes to bed with her lusty, mischievous best friend (Bebe Neuwirth) instead, complicating everything enormously. Combining elements of The Graduate, Voltaire's Candide, Woody Allen, Whit Stillman's Metropolitan, Holden Caulfield, and Oedipus Rex, director Gary Winick's Tadpole is an enticingly tart, oddball coming-of-age comedy, ripe with New York atmosphere and understated comedic tension, amplified by its low-budget but very intimate digital video style. Recommended. [Note: DVD extras include audio commentary by director Gary Winick. Bottom line: short on extras, but the film itself is still long on charm.] (R. Blackwelder)