Get Real **** (1998, Ben Silverstone, Brad Gorton, Charlotte Brittain) – Classic Movie Review 616

Boy meets boy. Boy likes boy. Boy oh boy! School’s out and so’s adolescent Steve Carter (Ben Silverstone) in director Simon Shore’s 1998 movie. It’s a refreshingly sweet, cute, charming and compelling coming-out, coming-of-age, and coming-to-terms-with-who-you-are Brit comedy-drama.

The 16-year-old schoolboy Steve has his heart set on the school sports star, John Dixon (Brad Gorton), and is amazed when things start moving in the right direction. This feel-good gay movie means so well, and says all the right things, that it would be kind of churlish to complain of just a slight case of wish-fulfilment (like 1996’s Beautiful Thing, which it resembles, without being quite so confident or successful). What is life and love were to work out just for once?

Apart from Silverstone, who’s just about exactly right with his schoolboy gawky bravado, and Jacquetta May as his understanding mum, the acting’s just slightly on the moderate side. But the film’s still very enjoyable, amusing and satisfying, though. Patrick Wilde’s decent film script is based on his own stage play What’s Wrong with Angry?

Although, despite being distributed by major studio Paramount, it was unsurprisingly not a box office smash, Get Real has attained a cult status with fans.

Ben Silverstone’s breakthrough was via family friend Mike Figgis, who gave him a major role in his film The Browning Version (1994) as Taplow. Silverstone left Cambridge University with a First Class degree in June 2001 and trained to be a barrister in England.

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