To his house one day comes a young adolescent named Chuck (Nick Stahl), who wants to go to a prep school and asks McLeod to be his tutor. At first, McLeod is distant and abrupt with him. He sets him meaningless tasks: "Right here, I want a hole dug. Three feet, cubic." He has him write essays. McLeod eventually relaxes around the boy, and they become friends.

Chuck comes from a disorganized background. His mother (Margaret Whitton) has had three children, each by a different husband, and is working on a potential new spouse, known to Chuck as "the Hairball." Chuck is often at war with his older and younger sisters, and some times with his mother, too, but the movie avoids the cliches of the "unhappy home" and shows that the family is no more dysfunctional, alas, than many others.

It's society that's dysfunctional, viewing with suspicion any friendship between a solitary older man and a young boy - especially because of the disturbing rumors about the man's past, and the circumstances of his injury. Eventually the local police chief (Geoffrey Lewis) steps in, among fears that molestation has taken place. And Chuck is threatened with the loss of his teacher and friend.

Here is what I mean about the movie not being willfully dumb.

Given this setup, nine out of 10 Hollywood movies would cut straight to some kind of contrived courtroom scene, in which good and evil would come swinging out of their appropriate corners and the movie would end like all courtroom dramas. "The Man Without a Face" cares too much about its theme to use formula shortcuts. And its theme is not molestation, or guilt and innocence, but trust - trust, and the way a good teacher must allow a good student to figure things out on his own.

The movie is Gibson's debut as a director, and shows him not only with a good visual sense, but with what is even rarer, the confidence to know what needs to be told and what can be left unsaid.

The mystery of his character's past, for example, is left deliberately unclear, so that when the boy confronts him near the end of the film, the teacher can give him an important lesson: We must be willing to decide the truth for ourselves, based on what we believe and have experienced, instead of allowing others to do it for us.

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