Radio is one of those rare, special movies. It’s something we haven’t seen in a while, disguised as a great many things we have seen, almost to the point of nausea. American audiences will immediately feel intimate with the film’s smalltown atmosphere, its can-do attitude, and its glorious triumphs of the human spirit, from the most highly evolved members of this species down to the most readily dispensible by government mandate. Why, people may even recognize (and rightly so) that Radio is an amazingly fluid hybrid of three distinct genres in filmmaking formula: The Magical Retard meets The Loosely Based On Real Events (probably a 300-word human interest piece in Parade magazine) meets Messianic White Man Helps Dark Colored Person/People. But here’s what you don’t know about Radio: he eats babies. Lots of them. Sometimes two at a time, working back and forth from hand to hand. And a whole Southern town turns its collective head while it happens. Is that sick or is it just the inevitable sacrifice you must make to slake your thirst at the till of Knowledge?
Of course, it’s mostly tasteful, offscreen baby-eating – an ominous, lengthened silhouette of Radio leaning over a crib or a squeamish pan away from the action as Radio unhinges his jaw around an infant’s soft head, a long string of saliva escaping from his cracked lips in greedy anticipation of a feeding. But forget what you see and what is mere suggestion, and make no mistake about it: this baby-eating business is just as much a part of his story as football, listening to the perfect Motown song on antique radios, and offering unsolicited hugs to high school students. And that’s the kind of thing they don’t put in the posters because, really, how do you photograph magic? (and don’t you dare answer, ‘with a white wizard’s camera, and film sprinkled with faerie dust from the valley of Noom,’ you no-good cheating son of a bitch.)
Radio’s teaching us, all right, and not just about laughing and dancing and tackling and eating babies. Even if we draw your eyelids like shades, he’s still showing us things that burn right through and make us cry out because, isn’t it true, the truth doesn’t feel like the soft belly of a kitten. That shit hurts, like the poison-tipped spiked belly of one of those Pokemons. Yeah, Radio’s teaching us, and you know what? There’s not a thing we can teach that kid ourselves. Not a God Damn Thing.
