When
one thinks of comedian-turned-actor Tom Arnold, normally they do not
picture the serious side of the guy. Instead they picture the
light-hearted roles, the tabloid gossip and the sitcoms. The man has
made a name as a good-natured, slightly shallow goofball.
This makes his performance in the indie film Gardens of the Night
all the more shocking. Arnold has done dramatic roles before – often
very well – but this harrowing character ratchets things up to a new
level. It is as fine and brave a job of acting as has been seen in
2008, a truly selfless and vanity-free attempt to show that the face of
evil is not always as obvious as one might expect.
In the film, Arnold plays Alex, a pedophile who kidnaps two small
children and essentially destroys their lives, despite the fact that in
his own deluded mind he thinks he is creating a (dysfunctional,
admittedly) family dynamic.
Mr. Arnold was surprisingly open to us at our meeting a couple of weeks
before the film’s New York release. In a small conference room at the
Regency Hotel in New York, he gave a vivid and at times painful
explanation of why Gardens of the Night was so important to him -- as an
actor, as a human being and as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.
“The
reason I took it on was because I read the script and I had a personal
connection to this character of Leslie [the abused girl in the film],”
Arnold explains. “I liked that there is hope in the end and that the
cycle is broken in the older Leslie. She was going home. It was going
to be different. It was going to be better. As someone who, when they
were young, had an experience… not as dramatic, but… you want to know
that it can be okay.”
Perhaps it can be okay, but Gardens of the Night mostly shows the
great crippling psychological damage that childhood sexual abuse can
cause. The screenplay was a labor of love for British director Damian
Harris – who had previously made the acclaimed films The Rachel
Papers and Mercy and is the son of the late actor
Richard Harris. Harris had worked for eighteen years trying to get the
film made, going through many casts (originally it was supposed to be a
Leonardo DiCaprio film) and investors before finally deciding to finance
the film himself.
The
surprising part is that Arnold’s character of Alex is not played as a
monster – though of course he is. However, unlike his angry younger
henchman Frank (played by Kevin Zegers of Transamerica), Alex
almost seems kind sometimes, like in his deluded way he really
believes that he is protecting the small children. However, Arnold
admits that he needed to show that kind of dichotomy – besides, truly he
knew that the role was indefensible – and should be.
When
he took the role, Arnold admits, “I asked Damian, I wanted an out for
the character. I knew he’d researched this film for seventeen years.
The character… I wanted an out. And he wouldn’t give me anything. I
said what if he’s such a nice kidnapper and the other guy is the mean
one. He wanted to fight, it stung a little, and he said ‘well, Kevin
Zegers – the mean one – he’s been your partner since he was eight.’ So
there’s no out for me. I’m just going to have to figure that out.
“I
come across as pretty nice and I’ve done a lot of movies where I was
funny, I think that helps. For me personally, I was going through a
divorce and my self-esteem was just perfect for it – low. I knew
I was going to be in this. So, I just played the guy that molested me
for three years – when I was four to seven.”
Arnold realized from his own experience that the abuser usually isn’t
the monster that you would imagine – it is a seemingly normal person who
does unspeakable things.
“In
fact he was nice,” Arnold admits. “He was very nice. I
thought he was a couple of years older than me. I didn’t know until I
was thirty and I was rehabbing. At the end, you do an inventory of your
drugs, alcohol and sex. I remember saying between the time I was four
and seven… my mother left when I was four – she used to leave me with
this guy. Between the time I was four and seven, the thing is me and
this neighbor… I was a kid. I didn’t know what sex was. He was my
babysitter. [I said] it was probably something boys do. It probably
was just some natural… [Then] the therapist said ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa! So
you’re telling me you were five and had a seven-year-old babysitter?’ I
was like, yeah. He said ‘I want you to research that.’ I researched
it, and the guy, of course, was a man. Then it struck me that I’d
always known he was a man, because he had a man body.
“The
reason I didn’t tell my dad was because he gave me a candy bar at the
end of the game. My dad didn’t want me to eat candy because I’d get so
hyper. So I had a secret. Plus he was so nice. He’d tell me, ‘Your
mother, she doesn’t love you. She left. I’m here for you.’ So [in the
role] I wanted to show how manipulative and nice and how a kid… a smart
kid… could get mixed up.”
All
these years later, the experience still haunts him. Arnold draws back
into himself as he tells the story, making himself
small, his voice periodically breaking, often looking at the
table as he speaks. Still, he pushes on, telling his story in hushed
tones.
“I
confronted the guy,” Arnold explains. “After this rehab thing, I went
back home to talk to some kids I hadn’t talked to in years. All the
boys wouldn’t talk about it, because I think there’s a stigma on boys.
It makes you feel less than a man, I guess. I got a private eye and
found out where he was. He was a church leader. He was married. He
had adapted three boys. He ran a big business in Des Moines [Iowa]. I
worked for six months and prepared for this – how to do this and not
strangle him. I showed up at his place of business. It was all the way
down the hall. He hadn’t come out of the office. He saw me – and he
hadn’t seen me in 23 years – but he knew exactly why I was there. I
started my spiel, you know. I’d been working on it. I’m here to give
you back the shame that you brought me as a kid. I just wanted to leave
it behind, you know? He came right up to me and jammed his finger in my
chest. For a second, I was four. I was five. I was a kid. He was
big. He was mean. I could smell it. I remembered every detail. It
was much more violent than I thought. I was scared. I’m 6’2”, 240.
Then I snapped out of it. I grabbed his hand and said if you ever
touch me again, I’m going to break your fucking neck. By now, all
his employees were there. They knew who I was.
“I
walked out of there like, oh, I’ve done it. I’ve done it. I was like
Rocky. Then I was thinking, where he lives now – what about those
kids? I had the farmhands put six blocks around his house kid-high
posters of his face, his address and his crimes. Then I heard he was
adopting another boy. I went straight to the state capitol. I got the
Governor of Iowa. I said you’ve got to help me stop this. He’s a
molester and they don’t stop. I’m telling you, they molest one boy,
they molest 250. He said, ‘Well, the statute of limitations is way over
on you. It would be illegal to stop this.’ I said you have to, because
he’s growing his own victims. I just know it. He’s like, ‘Okay, it’s
illegal. We never had this conversation, okay? I need you to leave
right now, Tom. You weren’t here. Go back to California. That’s it.’
I was like, God, you know? So I go back and two days later, my brother
called me and goes, ‘I’ve got some good news. There was a problem for
the paperwork for the adoption. It didn’t go through.’
“I
was very grateful for that. Plus, I’d made it known to everybody. I
thought I’d done everything I could do. But then, I look at my life in
the last eighteen years and I say to myself, where is my self esteem?
Where is it? It’s better. It’s better, because I’ve been being of
service. I’m helping. But where is it?” he asks, his voice cracking.
“Why have I had three marriages and they have all lasted four years?
Why the same amount? Why don’t I have the family I always dreamed of?
The one thing I never did to this guy was show him. Show how
manipulative he was. Damian gave me that opportunity. To [show] he’s a
nice guy. He needs her to like him. He really needs it. He
needs it and I know that. That guy was my fucking friend, man. He was
there for me.”
Director Harris agrees that this ambiguity was all important to the
film. “To answer quickly about how Tom comes across as being
sympathetic, or Alex [his character] does, it’s because the film is very
much from Leslie’s point of view. Leslie’s perception of Alex is: she
wants to believe that he is good, because he’s now the one looking after
her. Whatever his motivations are, why he needs to woo her – and I
think Alex needs to woo Leslie, he’s not going to force himself on her –
she interprets in a way as seeing him being her caregiver now. He’s
going to look after her. It’s through her, because we are filtering the
whole movie through her. It’s what comes out to us. She has very
ambivalent feelings towards him, but I think it’s good that the audience
has ambivalent feelings, too. That means we’ve been successful at
portraying how it is that Leslie is processing what’s going on with
her.”
Actress
Gillian Jacobs, who plays the role of the little girl grown up to be a
homeless prostitute in San Diego, found that supposed kindness to be one
of the most powerful attributes to Arnold’s work in the film.
“You
see the cycle of abuse,” Jacobs says. “Sometimes the perpetrator is a
victim themselves. You have to think there is a mental illness going
on. I’m not qualified to give a diagnosis, of the character, but… I
think his portrayal goes a long way towards making it a
three-dimensional character that you’re capable of having conflicting
emotions about. That speaks a lot to his performance. In the hands of
another actor, it could have been easily dismissible.”
“There has to be a reason, because ten years later she still believes
that she was living with her uncle,” Arnold says. “When I say about her
parents, ‘They don’t want you,’ I believe. I convince her of that.
And, boy, can I relate to it. My character can sure relate to it,
because he went through the same thing. [Harris] wrote – it was simple,
but it was a perfect thing – there’s a comparison of a great night that
I had with my dad and he disappeared. I don’t know if that came from
[his] personal life or whatever, but it felt real to me. My character
genuinely needed her approval. He needed her to like him. Whatever
happened to him – you could say he’s sick, you could say he’s whatever.
That he is a demon. He’s evil.”
“He’s evil,” Harris agrees, “but the film is about dealing with
something that happens to you. You’re left with an event that happens
in your life and how you cross that so that you grow up. That person
disappears into the ether. They are not there anymore. And yet they
have had an incredible impact in your life and remain in your life as
some kind of ghost. The struggle in the film and for Leslie is to break
free of these shackles. To not be Alex’s prisoner anymore.”
“Also to break the cycle,” Arnold says. “As a survivor of this…
whatever… seeing someone literally break the cycle. Leslie breaks the
cycle and not only breaks the cycle, but instead of denying the past it
hits her and she has to deal with it. She’s very heroic the way she
deals with it. That gives me tingles. That makes me feel in a way…
this is just me, Tom Arnold, talking, but that makes me feel like that’s
a brave young lady. There is hope for her. Because the truth is, this
happens. Versions of this happen every forty seconds, a kid is
abducted. I don’t know if I mentioned this, but I work with the Amber
Watch Foundation. With the internet now, and the kind of things…”
“One
in three or one in four girls are abused by the time they reach
seventeen,” Harris says. “For boys, the statistics are one in seven.”
“It’s higher than that,” Arnold replies.
“It
may be higher but they are embarrassed to talk about it because it’s the
same sex,” Harris continues. “It’s very prevalent. The film deals with
the repercussions of that – going through trauma as a child. Growing up
with that and keeping it internalized. It’s something where you don’t
have a scar on your skin. You don’t have a broken bone. It’s not
something that people can look at and talk to you about. You really
have to bring it out yourself. Otherwise it stays inside and it becomes
a baggage and a wound you take to every relationship you’re going to
have in the future.”
“And you’re killing yourself for something that wasn’t your fault,”
Arnold says. “These kids are killing themselves, with their drugs and
they are exposing themselves and risking themselves out there. They are
trying to hurt themselves, because they feel that they are bad. There
are moments of this film towards the end with Leslie where she gets it.
It’s not her. That’s very, very important for people to see. It is
about honestly portraying going home and the love that she has for her
family – Donnie – who is really her family.”
One
of the ways that Arnold and director Harris tried to make this harrowing
subject matter easier for their young stars – in the process evincing
extraordinary performances by child actors Ryan Simpkins (from Sherry
Baby) as young Leslie and Jermaine Scooter Smith (in his film debut)
as young Donnie – was by making sure that the two never knew what
the film was really about.
“We
all had this thing,” Arnold explains, “we said, here’s the deal, if she
had to cry, her mother would say ‘Just pretend your dog is lost,’ or
whatever. She’s such a good actress. She did Broadway with Jeremy
Sisto – who’s also in the movie [as a fellow pedophile who runs a
solicitation ring]. Here’s the deal, I’m a guy that never had a family
and I’m just kind of kidnapping kids trying to make a family. I never
had a family. Everybody else has one. That’s bad enough. That’s what
the kids knew [about the storyline]. They don’t know anything about the
other stuff. There was nothing graphic. In nine years, if they want to
see the film, they can. That was important to me.
“When I walked out of the room after [one particularly traumatic] scene,
Monique, her mother, kissed me on the lips,” Arnold recalls. “She said,
‘Thank you so much for not scaring my daughter. Just the way you’re
playing it is not scary at all.’ Kind of a lot of mixed feelings going
on there.”
Arnold is not leaving his mixed feelings in Gardens of the Night,
either. He explains that he has eight films finished, including two
more in which he plays extremely disturbing roles. First off, he plays
a small role in the film Good Dick as a man who had an incestuous
relationship with his daughter.
“I
did that as a favor to my son from Happy Endings, Jason
[Ritter],” Arnold says. “His girlfriend [Marianna Palka] wrote and
directed the film. He was in the film. You have to help first time
directors.”
Another first-time director he helped was Andrew Robinson, a survivor of
the Columbine High School massacre who wrote a script based on his
experience. Arnold plays a high school teacher who was killed in the
tragedy.
“It
is written by a kid that survived Columbine,” Arnold said. “That’s why
I read it. He did a good job. He directed it. I play the teacher that
got killed. He said the teacher really liked me. We shot it [at a
real] high school. It was tough.”
Of
course one of the problems with working with first-time directors is
that they don’t always understand how filmmaking is done. However,
Arnold helped the passionate director get filming into perspective early
on in the process.
“The
first day I got sent there, I could hear him as the kids were running
out of the school after the shooting,” Arnold says. “He was yelling,
‘Come on, people. People died. This really happened. I was there.
Goddamn it! Come on!’ I grabbed the bullhorn and said, don’t ever talk
to them like that again. These are kids. These are kids from
Nebraska. These are just kids. They don’t need to walk away from the
movie with post-traumatic stress. I [know] that a lot, because I just
came back from the Middle East. Plus, we are filming this
inside the high school. Do you know what that means? It means one
parent complains and we’re out of here. So, tone it down. We get it.
You were there.”
Still, despite the shaky start, Arnold walked away from the filming with
respect for the young filmmaker.
“He
did a great job,” Arnold says. “Never showed the killers. It didn’t
glorify them. I didn’t want to fucking see those guys. It was an
amalgamation of things that happened. I didn’t want to see Klebold and
those motherfuckers and have the other kids say, ‘Oh, I want to be that
guy.’ You know, it’s just that terror that you don’t see – which is
what Damian did so well, too.”
While waiting for these new projects to be released, right now Arnold is
focused on the importance of getting word out about Gardens of the
Night, which will be released in New York on November 7, 2008 and
then will roll out across the country in the upcoming weeks. The stars
and director of the film hope that its dark subject matter will not
scare away an audience, because it is on a subject which is very
important to bring to light.
“When
I read it, I was taken by the story and the character and I was really
excited by the challenge of it,” co-star Gillian Jacobs says. “We
learned a lot in the process of making the film. Despite the difficult
subject matter, I actually enjoyed the experience of making it. Then
you watch it with an audience and you hear these audible gasps of horror
– or people talk about how difficult it is for people to watch it. Then
you realize the power of the film to communicate to other people.”
Co-star Evan Ross, who played grown-up Donnie, agrees. “I didn’t take
it on lightly. From the first time I read the script, I loved it. I
knew I wanted to be a part of it, because it was something I was
interested in. I felt it was important. To this day, it’s something
that people really find too tough to see. The more I worked on it, the
more I studied, the more passionate I became about. I never really
realized how bad it really was. I feel like it’s really important that
people take the time to watch it and not be ignorant of what’s going
on.”
“With this movie I want to create a dialogue,” Director Harris says.
“Connect with people and get an emotional response. Bring out into the
open something you had thought you couldn’t bring up.
What
does Arnold want to bring away from the experience of making Gardens
of the Night?
“The same,” he says. “And to win some major award to go with my Razzies.
I have been nominated for six Razzies. I was nominated for three in one
year. Not bragging, but…” He chuckles, “my friend has an Oscar
and Razzie, too – Steve Tisch, who owns this hotel. No, you do
something like this for the same reason [Harris] just said. And for
myself. Just to try and get better.”
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