Cut

Author(s): Evan (N/A)
Cut

Directed By: Catherine Hardwicke
Written By: Patricia McCormick

Main Cast

Callie – Charlie Ray
Sam – Ty Panitz
Sarah (Mother) – Carrie-Ann Moss
Tiffany – Alexia Fast
Claire – Denise Richards

Tagline: “Callie loved the pain, but she couldn’t handle the hurt.”

Synopsis:

“Take a walk you can hardly breathe the air, look around, it’s a hard life everywhere, people talk, but they never really care, on the street is a feeling of despair.”
-Neil Diamond

Callie seems like an average teenager. She has a family consisting of her parents and younger brother Sam, goes to a normal high school and runs track. Callie's life seems normal. But Callie's life is not at all normal. Callie has a dangerous secret: she cuts herself. Never too deep, never enough to die, Just enough to feel the pain. Enough to feel the scream inside. When her mother and father find out, they decide to send her to Sea Pines, which is a residential treatment facility north of San Francisco. Girls who are there with her suffer from various illnesses. One girl is anorexic, another is grossly overweight. A couple of girls are illegal drug abusers. One girl also has SI, a certain sort of self-injury, just like Callie. Her name is Tiffany and they become friends without speaking. They all have to go to meetings and group sessions to get well, and hopefully discharged from, as the girls call it, ‘Sick Minds.’

At first the other girls label her S.T., for ‘Silent Treatment’ because she didn’t ever speak, and the doctors at the hospital think it may be best to send her home and let someone who wants to get well take her bed. Even her personal therapist, Claire, is starting to give up on her. Although she doesn’t think that the therapy is helping, she has a breakthrough one night. After she steals a pie plate and makes it into a cutting utensil. She finds when she cuts her arm this time that it hurts badly.

After this incident, Callie starts to open up. They find out that her younger brother is ill with severe asthma. Ever since her brother became sick, her mother has acted very peculiar. She refuses to drive on highways, she is obsessive about the cleanliness of the house and she’s basically become a recluse. Callie’s dad is also probably an alcoholic, and certainly a workaholic. They find out that Callie was babysitting her brother the first time he got really sick, and Callie had to go and find her father at the local bar and ask him to come home.

After her mother and brother come to visit her, Callie sees that her brother really needs her, and he says he does. She decides to go home, for her brother. She slips out of the facility in the middle of the night and
runs away through a heavily wooded pine forest. As she walks down the highway she realizes she really does want to get better, and that she can’t help anyone else if she can’t even help herself. Callie heads back to Sea Pines, so she won’t have to suffer the hurt of loving pain.

“…But everyday, there’s a brand new baby born, and everyday there’s then sun to keep you warm, and it’s alright, yeah it’s alright, I’m alive.” -Neil Diamond

What The Press Would Say:

In her ferocious and dark adaptation of Patricia McCormick’s novel “Cut,” Catherine Hardwicke has created a gruesomely intelligent portrayal of a girl who cuts herself, and her life and rehabilitation. In this deeply moving film, Charlie Ray gives an intense and smart performance as Callie. In her first big role since “Little Manhattan,” Ms. Ray gets into the audiences heart, mind, and blood, taking them on a roller coaster ride as she finds what she wants, and what she needs. The performance radiates raw pain and energy, hurtling herself towards controversy in a performance that is sure to be one of the best of the year. Ty Panitz, although young, gives a great, and heartbreaking performance as the one who saves Callie from the icy hands of death. Panitz gives a very strong performance. Carrie-Ann Moss gives an amazing performance as Callie’s mother, a women who is too careful, and too carefree at the same time. She is so concentrated on Sam that she doesn’t give Callie the life she needs. Mrs. Hardwicke’s greatest achievement, though, is the defined gap in the film between hurt and pain. It shows us that the shadowed space between hurt and pain is ever moving, and changes for each person. “Cut” is astonishing in the gritty reality that it portrays, and will live on as one of the best films ever made about teens, and a thoughtful look at teenage mental illness.

FYC
Best Picture
Best Director – Catherine Hardwicke
Best Actress – Charlie Ray
Best Supporting Actor – Ty Panitz
Best Supporting Actress – Carrie-Ann Moss
Best Supporting Actress – Denise Richards
Best Adapted Screenplay
Best Score
Best Cult Bait
Best Awards Campaign