Scriptwriter Robert Getchell based This Boy’s Life on Tobias Wolff’s autobiography writer and book are still present in the voice-over.Toby’s youth was not easy. He grew with his divorced mother who hardly has enough money to make ends meet. She remarried mainly for financial reasons. His step-father Dwight is introduced as a gushing charmer but turns out to be a real creep who assaults both the mother and her son. The simple warehouseman Toby then seeks an apparently-impossible way to escape life in the outback: he wants to study. An unheard of and fairy-tale thought.Toby’s mother is charmingly played by Ellen Barkin and the simple, conceited and far-from-good-natured stepfather is noneother than Robert De Niro. He revs up his role to comic and chilling effect. There is even a moment in the film when the tormented and frustrated Dwight gives Toby such a beating that this ‘warm’ film briefly almost becomes horror.
