A nuanced movie exploring gun culture is creating buzz at big-name film festivals and its creator has roots in the Valley.
In the movie “Our Hero, Balthazar,” wealthy New York City teenager Balthazar “Balthy” Malone (played by Jaeden Martell), tries to impress his crush, Eleanor (Pippa Knowles), an anti-gun activist, by posting emotional videos of himself crying in response to gun violence on Instagram. Balthy’s posts generate positive feedback, they also attract the attention of Solomon Jackson (Asa Butterfield), a lonely young man who lives with his grandmother at a Texas trailer park. Amid his trolling, Solomon divulges that he’s going to shoot up a school.
The movie’s co-writer and producer, Ricky Camilleri, who now resides in New York City, is a native of Easthampton and attended Hampshire College.
“I love the Valley,” Camilleri said. “It’s deep, deep, deep in my bones.”
His upbringing gave him “a mixture of blue-collar cynicism and very liberal activism,” he said. As a high school student, Camilleri spent a lot of time at Pleasant Street Video, where he was introduced to the works of filmmakers like Gregg Araki whose work, Camilleri says, is “transgressive and taboo.”
And his experience at Hampshire College provided “an incredible breeding ground for new thought, new interests, and a kind of education that I wasn’t going to get from my parents,” he said. “I got a very great different kind of education from them as well.”
Camilleri has an impressive background in media; prior to writing and producing films, he co-created, co-wrote and hosted “What to Watch” at AOL, hosted The Huffington Post’s streaming news network HuffPost Live, and appeared on CBS This Morning, The Today Show and other programs. Screenplays and plays he’s written have appeared at festivals across the country.
Camilleri and “Our Hero, Balthazar” co-writer Oscar Boyson, who produced “Uncut Gems” and “Frances Ha,” developed the idea of Balthy traveling across the country to stop a mass shooting after reading about the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022. They’d read that the shooter told a girl in Germany that he was going to commit a mass shooting and that she’d only replied, “Cool.”
“Then you just start extrapolating: What kid would have the resources to do that? What kid would be deluded enough to do that? What would be deluding them? What would his family life be like? And then you start writing it,” Camilleri said.
Despite the movie’s title, Balthy is no cut-and-dry hero. He has a predisposition for lying: when Solomon blocks his original Instagram account, Balthy makes a fake profile using AI. When he’s annoyed that his life coach, Anthony (played by Noah Centineo), tries to celebrate his birthday a few days early, he summons his biggest crocodile tears and asks Anthony, in front of his friends, “Why did you rape me?” At other times, he is completely oblivious and lacking empathy.
Solomon, too, is a very complex character, desperate for connection. For a time, he seems like he’d be redeemable if he just had the right support. The movie repeatedly uses the word “incel” to describe Solomon — both when other characters call him one and when he, showing off to Balthy, boasts that he isn’t. Rather than make a specific point about inceldom or incel culture, Camilleri said, “We never wanted to expose or do an exposé on being an incel, because all an incel really is, is just a [expletive] kid that’s online, that doesn’t have a life, and is going down the wrong rabbit holes and maybe is unattractive to the opposite sex or the same sex.” Flat-out labeling a struggling outcast an “incel,” he said, “just seems like another form of losing empathy.”
In an attempt to prevent another mass tragedy, Balthy flies to Texas to meet and befriend Solomon. No spoilers for what happens after that, but the crux of the story is the will-he-or-won’t-he tension about Solomon’s desire to commit a shooting.
Rather than take away a political or cultural statement about whether guns are good or bad, Camilleri said, “I want people to take away an experience.”
“We spend so much time online consuming information that we don’t really engage with experiences and stories as well anymore, and the stories that we do engage with online are manufactured to so clearly draw a point or an obvious emotion,” he said. “And I wouldn’t say that I want anyone to take away some sort of nuanced political perspective. I would just want them to take away an experience — one that is scary, one that is thrilling, one that is funny, one that is embarrassing, one that feels kind of like living in right now.”
“Our Hero, Balthazar” is not yet available to stream digitally, but Camilleri hopes to screen the movie at Amherst Cinema in February or March after its releases in New York City and Los Angeles.
For more information about the film, visit rottentomatoes.com/m/our_hero_balthazar. For information on Camilleri, visit ricky-camilleri.squarespace.com.
Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.