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MOVIES | MOVIE REVIEW

A Boy Lost in the Underworld‘Stand Clear of the Closing Doors,’ a Subway Odyssey

NYT Critics' Pick

By STEPHEN HOLDEN MAY 22, 2014

“Stand Clear of the Closing Doors,” a small miracle of a film, captures the

grass-roots swirl of New York City with an extraordinary sensory attuning

to urban life. Set largely inside the city’s subway system, it observes the

world through the eyes of Ricky (Jesus Sanchez-Velez), a bright but easily

distracted 13-year-old boy with midrange autism who gets lost

underground. Mr. Sanchez-Velez, the untrained actor who plays him, has

Asperger’s syndrome and is a hauntingly plaintive screen presence.

Entranced by a dragon decal on a stranger’s jacket, Ricky follows him

into the subway at Rockaway Beach, Queens, where he lives with his

mother, Mariana (Andrea Suarez Paz), and 15-year-old sister, Carla (Azul

Zorrilla). His father, Ricardo Sr., who is working upstate when Ricky

disappears, is rarely at home but shows up late in the movie to help look

for him.

Mariana is an illegal Mexican immigrant who works as a part-time

housekeeper. Ricky wanders off and disappears when Carla neglects her

daily task of walking him home from school, to go shopping. Mariana is

furious. Even in ordinary times, Ricky is a handful for whom school

officials lack the resources to devote the attention he requires.

As the movie jumps back and forth between mother and son, Mariana

becomes increasingly panicked, while Ricky gradually crumples into

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himself, growing hungrier, his only sustenance a bag of potato chips he

buys with his last four quarters and a banana given to him by a homeless

man. He also becomes dirtier. After a futile search for an unlocked

bathroom, he urinates in his seat, and other passengers comment and

begin to avoid him. It isn’t clear how many days and nights he remains

adrift.

Throughout the movie, you are forcefully reminded that time spent on

the subway may be the ultimate New York grounding experience. You feel

the city’s collective pulse as the entire spectrum of humanity pours around

you. The movie captures the complicated mixture of loneliness,

exhilaration, fear and curiosity of subway travel, which even in the

quietest of times can be a hallucinatory experience that seeps deep into

your consciousness.

Directed by Sam Fleischner from a screenplay by Rose Lichter-Marck

and Micah Bloomberg, the film has such an infallible ear for subway

sounds, riders’ remarks and panhandlers’ spiels that it is next to

impossible to distinguish overheard conversations by nonactors from

scripted dialogue. It also finds an intense, gritty beauty in the patterns of

tiles and pipes that Ricky studies fixedly as he rides from one end of the

system to the other and back, stopping more than once at Times Square.

Ricky is an uncommonly imaginative artist with an entire notebook of

drawings depicting dragons like the one on the stranger’s jacket. A more

ethereal beauty is glimpsed in the subway lights and in reflections on car

windows as the trains swoosh by one another. Now and then, the film

pauses to study a colored image as though gazing through half-closed eyes.

“Stand Clear of the Closing Doors” sharply distinguishes Ricky’s

dreaminess with Mariana’s hard-edge desperation. The emergency forces

Mariana out of her shell, and she befriends Carmen (Marsha Stephanie

Blake), a saleswoman from a shoe store Ricky frequents who accompanies

Mariana to a police station and helps her distribute fliers.

The movie was three-quarters of the way toward completion when

Hurricane Sandy hammered the Rockaways. Mr. Fleischner’s home was

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destroyed, and the subway closed for over a week. He had to rethink the

ending.

“Stand Clear of the Closing Doors” is all the more impressive for not

overreacting to the catastrophe and making it the main event. It stays with

its characters to a wonderfully witty and understated ending.

Stand Clear of the Closing Doors

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by Sam Fleischner; written by Rose Lichter-Marck and Micah Bloomberg, basedon a story by Ms. Lichter-Marck; directors of photography, Adam Jandrup and EthanPalmer; edited by Talia Barrett; production design by Sara K. White; produced by AndrewNeel, Veronica Nickel, Dave Saltzman and Craig Shilowich; released by OscilloscopeLaboratories. At the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1hour 40 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Andrea Suarez Paz (Mariana), Jesus Sanchez-Velez (Ricky), Azul Zorrilla (Carla),Tenoch Huerta Mejía (Ricardo Sr.) and Marsha Stephanie Blake (Carmen).

A version of this review appears in print on May 23, 2014, on page C8 of the New York edition withthe headline: A Boy Lost in the Underworld.

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