In Jamie Marks is Dead, the tone throughout is different. The film begins with the discovery of a body, and the discoverer seems less disturbed than shocked by what she has stumbled upon. Adapted from the Young Adult-genre novel, One for Sorrow, written by Christopher Barzak, Jamie Marks is Dead explores the disparate values that we put on life and death. This is most evident in the transformation of the titles in Carter Smith’s adaptation. Smith, who previously directed The Ruins, likens his new film closer to his previous work, Bugcrush, wherein both offer the intersection of the familiar with the unfamiliar, and even the uncanny.
Jokes could be made about the spoiler in the title, Jamie Marks is Dead. It leaves little intrigue as to the fate of the titular character, but Smith’s choice to completely change the title is significant in that the ”is” is the most relevant of verbs throughout the film. It’s upon his death that Marks becomes relevant, allowing Smith to illustrate the various ways that death manifests itself in visual markers that surpass the importance of Marks’ agency when he was alive. We are told little about Marks’ life, except we know that he was bullied, and we can assume this is because of his presumed meekness and homosexuality. He is the target of bullying and the kid that other characters lament not helping, but only upon his death.
The one character in particular that most laments is Adam McCormick (Cameron Monaghen). After Marks’ death, Adam flashes back to a time that he witnessed Jamie bullied in a bathroom stall and urinated on. Instead of stepping in, he walks away. This moment, while a trope in the world of young adult fiction, comes to signify a deeper connection between Adam and Jamie that went undiscovered before Jamie’s death.
Despite the source material being a young-adult-focused novel, director Carter Smith picks him moments to emphasize absurdity and left a number of inclusions on the cutting room floor. For Smith, the focus is the aftermath of Jamie’s death and the impact it has on Adam. In this, he downplays the could-be-silly relationship between Adam, his mother Linda (Liv Tyler), and her best friend Lucy (Judy Greer). Not to be omitted is the fact that Lucy is both a drunk and the woman who paralyses Linda in the first third of the film. While Linda’s emotional being is incredibly okay with being paralyzed by her best friend, there is a surreallity between the two women that almost seems palatable if you see them both as women at the absolute end of their respective ropes with nothing else to hang onto.
All told, this leaves Adam, much like Jamie, without any viable connections and to exist within a definition of “is” that is tenuous at best. Within this film, there is the typical teenage angst, but there is also a mordant sadness that begs us to investigate the relationships that we perceive.
