Eye For Film >> Movies >> I Am Tom Moody (2012) Film Review
A beautifully styled exercise in self-doubt, I Am Tom Moody is a confident and assured portrayal of a distinct lack of confidence and assurance. Tom is a musician of sorts, one plagued by the usual concerns, but here they're given flesh - childhood flesh, as Tom's doubt is ably personified by a smaller Tom.
Or, rather, the smaller Tom suffers and the larger Tom suffers still - it's easy enough to get recursive about these things, more so when one Tom pulls the other Tom out of his own ear. Hearing things - hearing things is important. "Get rid of it" is one thing worth hearing, the voice cast too - Mackenzie Crook is big Tom, Jude Crook (some relation) is little Tom, and Ainslie Henderson's film gives them both a, call it "Tom-ness". It's like finding photographs of your parents when they were children, like seeing a video of your own school play - the Jesuits said something about giving them the child and they'd give you the man, but here the Tom Moodys are parallel (if not parenthetic).
![Copy picture](/images/stills/i/i_am_tom_moody_2012_1.jpg)
The character design is grand, those shifting eyes, a dinosaur jumper, a skull mask armour against the world. Peter Dere's music is well used too, but it's the staging that makes it. It's not quite a two-hander, perhaps a hand and a half? One's minded to talk about swords, and that's not just down to the presence of a dragon - even if it is Rilke's, and therefore metaphorical. There's real craftsmanship here, the stop-motion cast are genuinely amazing, and there's something in the way that the marionettes' movement is hesitant, more so than the stutter of shutter-speed, that's genuinely affecting. The wobbly credits are a bit much, but they're an off-note at the end of an excellent piece - Tom Moody is worth knowing, even if he doesn't yet realise it.
Reviewed on: 08 Feb 2013