Powder

Halfway through this visually arresting, controversy-embroiled film, I found myself thinking that perhaps this might have been similar to what might have resulted if Rod Serling had written and directed Forrest Gump instead of Robert Zemeckis. Certainly, Powder's director Victor DeSalva is acquainted with The Twilight Zone: There's plenty of Serling's brand of misty-eyed fantasy and loss of innocence here. But DeSalva isn't really a storyteller. Serling was (though not beyond that seminal show's first two seasons). Powder's premise starts strong -- a teenaged genius suffering from the dual pangs of albinism and an odd propensity to attract large jolts of electrical current is thrust into the world when his caretakers die and he becomes a ward of the state. Taken to the state home for wayward and parentless youth (exactly what state this is we're never told, nor does it matter), Powder (Flanery) is immediately and predictably ostracized by his bullying peers. Only the social worker Mary Steenburgen is in his corner and, perhaps, Henricksen's gruff local sheriff. When given a chance to attend the regular high school on a trial basis, he literally electrifies both his peers and local science prof Goldblum. As a tale of an outsider and teenage angst taken to its dangerous, passionate extreme, the film has echoes of everything from Brian DePalma's Carrie to Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth, and, at times, it's every bit as exhilarating as either of those films. DeSalva stumbles, though, when he overplays his emotional hand. Subplots having to do with family reconciliations and cut-and-paste schoolyard bullies constantly threaten to drag the film down to the level of a trippy after-school special. It never quite falls flat on its face -- Flanery's nervous, riveting portrayal of Powder just won't let it -- but occasionally it dips mighty close (as in the predictable doomed-romance cliché). Despite the obvious problems, though, Powder retains a lyrical shine. It's a modern fable, and at the heart of it, a rather depressing one at that. But that doesn't make it any less magical.