This Boy's Life

A single mother and her difficult son find family life isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be in this drama adapted from writer and professor Tobias Wolff's 1989 memoir of the same name. Nomadic, flaky Caroline (Ellen Barkin) just wants to settle down in one place, find a decent guy, and ...more

It's obvious that This Boy's Life shares an affinity with Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore even before one realizes that the films share the same scribe. Like a '90s take on a '50s version of Martin Scorcese's classic '70s women's picture, This Boy's Life concerns the relationship between a kooky but lovable single mom and her excitable son. To achieve this symmetry, screenwriter Robert Getchell shifts the focus of novelist and short-story writer Tobias Wolff's original memoir so that it ...more