Mean Creek

Director: Jacob Aaron Estes Jacob Aaron Estes

Overview

Independent filmmaker Jacob Aaron Estes makes his feature debut with the coming-of-age drama Mean Creek. Rory Culkin, Ryan Kelley, Scott Mechlowicz, Josh Peck, Trevor Morgan, and Carly Schroeder are teenagers living in small-town Oregon. Some of the boys take a boat trip for a birthday celebration. When they get an idea to play a mean trick on the town bully, it suddenly goes too far. Soon they're forced to deal with the unexpected consequences of their actions. Mean Creek was workshopped at the Eugene O'Neill Center's National Playwrights Conference and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival as part of the American Spectrum program.

Product Details

Release Date:	03/30/2021
UPC:	0032429355621
Original Release:	2003
Rating:	R
Source:	ALLIED VAUGHN
Language:	English
Time:	33:09:00
Sales rank:	49,231

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Rory Culkin	Sam
Ryan Kelley	Clyde
Scott Mechlowicz	Marty
Trevor Morgan	Rocky
Josh Peck	George
Carly Schroeder	Millie
J.W. Crawford	Tom
Michael Fisher-Welsh	Mr. Levinworth
Raissa Fleming	Maggie Tooney
Kaz Garas	Detective Wright
Shelly Lipkin	Mr. Merric
Heath Lourwood	Jasper
Ryan Peterson	Cashier
Hagai Shaham	Handsome Police Officer
Branden Williams	Kile

Technical Credits

Steve Buckley	Stunts
Susan Johnson	Producer
Matthew Lessall	Casting
Hagai Shaham	Producer
Jacob Aaron Estes	Director
Rick Rosenthal	Producer

Editorial Reviews

Of all the films that deal with the slippery morality of youth -- Kids and Thirteen come to mind -- Mean Creek is one of the few that does more in the name of complicated truth than simplistic shock value. Writer/director Jacob Aaron Estes really has something to say here, and thank goodness, it's not that teens left unsupervised become sociopaths. The bully at the center of Estes' captivating debut is alternately annoying and congenial, just like any precocious mid-teen -- and not unlike the teens who plot to teach him a lesson. Estes has a remarkably assured sense of the balance between kids' antisocial public persona and their underlying decency, and how peer posturing can cause that joking aggression to morph into something real and ugly. Estes also has an ear for their dialogue, and his occasional use of digital video (the bully is never without his DV camera) lends the film a palpable sense of realism. A good script and some astute symbolism wouldn't fly without strong performances, and Mean Creek has these as well. In direct contrast to his straight-laced work in Eurotrip, Scott Mechlowicz simmers as the rebellious instigator, and Rory Culkin shows the chops displayed by his older brother Kieran (but, alas, not his older brother Macaulay). As the lone girl on the boating trip, the impossibly innocent-looking Carly Schroeder has her own strong moments of moral weakness. They all contribute to giving the potentially clunky, overly literal title a secondary meaning: these kids may be mean, as in cruel, but they're also mean, as in...average.