A Separate Peace (1972)

          Lyrical and sensitive, Larry Peerce’s film of John Knowles’ acclaimed coming-of-age novel uses the friendship between two young men at a private school in the 1940s as a means of examining themes of aggression, jealousy, justice, masculinity, and even sanity. Although the film is modest and imperfect, the highest compliment one can pay is to note that the picture never veers off the path it defines during the opening scenes. From beginning to end, this take on A Separate Peace is a meditation on lost innocence shot through with pointed commentary about the costs of competition, hostility, and other craven aspects of the human experience, as exemplified by the way World War II lingers just outside the frame throughout much of the film.

          In a prologue, grown-up narrator Gene returns to the Devon School in the symbolically depleted season of winter, visiting a tall tree by a river where significant things once happened. He then flashes back to younger days, where teenaged Gene (Parker Stevenson) is nearly inseparable from his best friend, Finny (John Heyl). Introverted and studious, Gene finds the cavalier and irresponsible Finny intoxicating, a blonde paragon who seizes life with a vigor to which Gene can only weakly aspire. The first and cruelest blow to their friendship occurs one hot day when they run to that tree and prepare for a dangerous dive into the river below. Finny falls, breaking his leg, but neither of them is quite sure whether (or why) Gene rattled the branch upon which they were balanced, causing the accident. How the friends go forward after that event, and how they navigate the painful consequences of one confusing moment atop a tree branch, defines the courses of their lives. Meanwhile, seemingly peripheral dramas, such as the brief military service of troubled classmate Leper (Peter Brush) and the assumption of an authority position by malicious classmate Brinker (Victor Bevine), create additional tensions that impact the Gene/Finny saga.

          Some of the filmmaking team’s choices work better than others. Crisp long-lens photography lends both an icy remove and a sense of place, while delicate wafts of twinkly piano music accentuate the poetic flow of gentle dissolves connecting sequences. Less consistently effective is the acting, since some of the young players give tentative performances. (Leading man Heyl, a student at the school where the film was shot, made his acting debut with this project and never appeared onscreen again.) That some of the film’s most assured work comes from Stevenson, later of The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, says a great deal about the film’s limitations. Yet the sincerity of Stevenson’s work reflects an overall seriousness of purpose that helps the movie, more often than not, surpass its tendency toward self-conscious artiness.

A Separate Peace: FUNKY