Danny Murphy portrays Wesley here, a lonely, hearing-impaired, and bullied 10-year-old boy who bonds with a wounded fugitive (Aaron Paul) after Wesley finds him in the snows of North Dakota. Wesley offers the fugitive shelter and food while he recovers and in return receives much need life's lessons.

The pacing here is extremely slow and some of the plot elements are nonsensical, like how can Wesley's mother (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) have seemingly no clue that her son is gone for long periods of time. Although the acting is solid, with Winstead being one of my favorite actresses, the lack of energy in the film hampered it greatly, in my opinion.

Overall, although I was interested enough to stay with the movie to see how it would eventually turn out, it just became too much of a slog.

"The Parts You Lose" is a thoughtful, atmospheric film set in the bleak clime of South Dakota. In a landscape that often reveals the wasteland, a young boy with a hearing and speech disability bonds with criminal on the run. But the "bad guy" turns out to be the kind of father for which the boy yearns.

The film aesthetics were superb in capturing the winter scenes in the tiny community of Richfield. From the outset, it was clear that young Wesley has a loving mother, but his father was distant, uncaring, and even abusive. Even in his special education classes, Wesley suffers from the classroom bully. The kid literally has nowhere to go for genuine support.

Wesley obviously takes after his compassionate mother, as he drags a large adult male with a gunshot wound into the family barn. There, the story unfolds of the mentoring of the adult male and a youngster starved for human contact. On the one hand, Wesley learns about the mechanics of playing checkers. But he also learns about what it means to win and to lose.

The film's title pertains to finger lost by the criminal. He claims that a tiger bit off the finger. But the take-home message for Wesley is that the experience motivated the criminal to learn how to hunt and to survive.

The filmmakers were successful in developing a set of multi-dimensional characters. Just as Wesley's father was not a cardboard cutout villain, so the criminal was not an angel. The film unfolded in a way that life unfolds with an ebb-and-flow in the character interactions.

But, at heart, the film incisively portrays the relationships of fathers and sons. The criminal got a raw deal from his own father, who burned down the family home to collect on the insurance. He recognizes that Wesley is on a similar curve as his own childhood due to the erratic dad. The film demonstrates the power of compassion from the perspective a deeply flawed man, who recognized at some level that he had something meaningful to offer a little boy.

From the wastelands of Manitoba comes another crime story with a complex interweaving of subplots: A school bullied partially deaf boy; an unsettled homelife; a chance encounter with a criminal hiding from justice; said criminal receives then offers help to the young man. The viewer meanwhile is left to ponder the ethics of the situation.