The mysteries at the center of the tense drama Luce are really, you might say, for right now. Telling the story of a model perfect teen in an affluent Virginia suburb who is valedictorian, star athlete and pride of his family, teachers and community—and who might be harboring something much darker—it’s a hot-button movie that flirts with a multitude of provocations, offering few answers to the issues it raises.
By all measures, seventeen-year-old Luce Edgar (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) is exemplary. The adopted, African-born son of happily married, white parents (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth) is whole package—good looking, smart, popular, headed for major future success and held, by all, in the highest regard.
But underneath, Luce (“It means light”) might be a different story. A former child soldier from war-ravaged Eritrea who has, through the love and support of his parents, successfully triumphed over tumultuous beginnings in a textbook assignation of the American Dream, he’s a much-feted symbol of African underprivilege who, as a benefactor of old-fashioned American exceptionalism, seems destined for the Ivy League and beyond—what a great story (for everyone)!
This trajectory is rattled when Luce’s adamantine history and government teacher, Mrs. Wilson (Octavia Spencer), assigning an essay to be penned in the voice of an historic figure, is alarmed by Luce’s too-persuasive treatise on violence as a corrective to social ills, its prose uncomfortably persuasive particularly given his early childhood.
This leads to an unorthodox locker search and the discovery of illicit fireworks, prompting a sit-down with Luce’s bewildered mother, Amy (Watts), who initially rejects the smoke-and-fire proposition but upon her own investigation—including a clandestine meeting with a girlfriend (Andrea Bang, terrific) she didn’t know existed—grows increasingly suspicious of her son and distressed that a Pandora’s Box is about to open.
The slow-burn drama of whether the Edgars will confront Luce, even when they suspect he’s lying—after all, they’ve raised him well and don’t want to invade his privacy—plays out against the rising tensions at school, fissures in their once-harmonious marriage mirroring the increasing stressors between teacher and student.
Who is lying? What agendas are informing the inquiry? Has Luce appropriated an identity that “works” for everyone, including himself? Or is Mrs. Wilson, who has been criticized for being particularly hard on Black students and charged with seeing students through the lens of social causes, pursuing a meritless recrimination? If Luce’s parents come to an inconvenient truth, will they nonetheless protect their son? And what role do Luce’s friends play? Can his girlfriend be trusted to tell the truth?
Directed with ticking time-bomb calculation and precision by Julius Onah from a screenplay by Onah and J.C. Lee based on Lee’s play, Luce raises questions of nature and nurture, cultural assimilation and appropriation, racial tokenism, willful family blind spots, under the surface racism covered by civility, and the masks we wear to pass as others wish to see us.
That’s quite a heavy lift. And it gives Spencer a doozy of a character, one so complex—and so conflicted outside of school—that our sympathies all but shift to her corner. It’s not hard to see why, given Mrs. Wilson’s herculean personal struggle to take her unbalanced, rehabilitating adult sister (Marsha Stephanie Blake) into her home. Like Luce, it’s another potential acclimation—this one with disastrous results.
Luce is aware of her struggles and, late in the picture, her own trepidation around him. A terrific, late student and teacher standoff in Wilson’s living room crackles with insinuation, Harrison keeping us right on the edge about just what Luce is up to. Spencer thinks she knows—and it might be her downfall.
But is he responsible when her home is vandalized? Could it be that Luce has merely mastered what her sister hasn’t? That he has become so good as “passing” for what everyone expects of him—fulfilling the expectations of white, liberal do-goodism—that his real triumph has been to survive this predestined identity?
This is unmistakable, powder-keg stuff. And in the flinty, highly controlled performance by Kelvin Harrison, Jr., Luce is an enigma who never quite reveals himself.
Like its recondite titular character, the movie holds its cards close, its riddles unsolved. Luce is unquestionably the year’s most thought-provoking, adult movie.
It’s also one of its very best.
4 stars.
