‘Griffin in Summer’ – Teen crush tale takes a wildly witty edge

Nicholas Colia might well be the greatest living gay, Boston-raised director and screen writer America has ever cultivated. There’s no guarantee. After all, he’s only made one feature and several shorts. But what a feature!

Colia’s “Griffin in Summer" (Honor Role Films/Vertical), a wildly witty study of unbridled youthful hormones, last year walked away with a boatload of awards at the Tribeca Film Festival, including Best U.S. Narrative Feature and Best Screenplay, while earning a Someone to Watch nomination from the Indie Spirit Award folks.
So what’s this hullabaloo all about? Well, it’s summer vacation in the suburbs, and 14-year-old gangly Griffin (startlingly embodied by Everett Blunck) is planning to produce “Regrets of Autumn,” a play he’s written about his parents’ dissolving marriage. This highly precocious, ginger-haired and freckled youth, who’s never thrown a ball in his life, let alone shimmied up a rope in gym class, has entrapped four of his classmates into acting in and directing his magnum opus.

Harriet: “Walter, where’s my scotch?”

Walter: “Harriet, it’s nine o’clock in the morning.”

Imagine “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” being performed by the cast of “Hannah Montana.” Sadly, Griffin’s teen ensemble, currently experiencing a post-pubescent high which includes dating and partying, are not as professionally focused as Griffin, causing the lad to have a few meltdowns.

All is not going well for this youth, not at least until Mom hires a hunky, tattooed handyman and pool boy, Brad Rizzo (Owen Teague), who’s 25, straight, slightly alcoholic, and clearly not that bright.

Suddenly, Griffin is in love, and when he learns Brad is a performance artist who in his last show wore diapers, spit out whole eggs, and screamed a lot, he offers the chap a leading role in a rewritten “Regrets of Autumn” that might necessitate having Brad’s torso being rubbed down with mayonnaise.

Precocious kid
In an interview with the Bay Area Reporter, Nicholas Colia insisted there are autobiographical elements in the film.

“I didn’t have the kind of handyman experience of having a crush on an adult when I was a kid,” he shared. “The part that is mostly autobiographical is the theater stuff. I definitely spent my adolescence doing plays and films out of my parents’ basement that were very overly ambitious. I was always more interested in comedy.”

What about being precocious and annoying?

“I think that I was,” he confirmed. “Now I might be past being precocious, but yeah, I think I probably was, but I don’t know.”

His main characters, Griffin and then 9-year-old Alex in his short film, “Alex and the Handyman,” are self-centeredly honest and pushy. Colia was asked if people ever tell him to hold back.

“Oh, yeah!” Mr. Colia admitted. “People probably want me to talk less than I do. Sure. But I don’t know if people would identify me as definitely open. They would identify me as opinionated for sure.”

Colia does not have an extensive online presence, but on his film, he will talk at length.

“Griffin’s queerness is not incidental, but it’s also not the source of the central conflict in the film.”

He agreed that a gay main character alters any work’s focus.

“I think it absolutely colors everything,” he said. “But what I meant by that is that I don’t think Griffin’s struggle in the film is that he’s uncomfortable with or rejecting being gay. Or worried about how his friends or his environment or how his mother or father will react to it. He’s very privileged in that sense. His struggle is more about just that the person he’s attracted to for the first time in his life is not available to him for multiple reasons.”

Colia himself said he was also not uptight about coming out at 19, having been raised in the south end of Boston.

“I was privileged and lucky that way,” he said. “I think that’s why that’s my point of view with Griffin’s story. I’ve had other hard matters in my life but nothing about being gay.

“With Griffin,” he continued, “the whole thing of him being 14 and being able to verbalize his feelings really came more out of the experiences that I had later in life and just from people telling me what a common experience that having an adult crush is, whether it’s a teacher which for students tends to be a common experience. Though that was not an experience I had specifically.”

Colia deals with a desire that a young character might have but doesn’t actually define as sexual or maybe isn’t aware it’s sexual. In his earlier short film, “Alex and the Handyman,” the 9-year-old lad drugs the object of his affection with his mother’s Ambien in order to cuddle with him. The film can be rented on Venmo.

Asked if he’s received any complaints about that or his feature film, Colia said, “The short has a very, very dark sensibility. It’s certainly not for everybody to respond to. With “Griffin,” we really haven’t had much pushback at all. Really. Certainly not from anybody who’s seen the film which is refreshing. I have certainly been surprised that there hasn’t been more. I view the film as fairly innocent.”

‘Griffin in Summer’ releases on August 29 in select theaters from Vertical, and later on Apple TV.
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