As gangster movies go, which is basically in the direction of treating maggots as if they were lions, this is a great film—visually spectacular, fast, semi-poignant and filled with brilliant acting. Like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, however, director Brian DePalma is amazingly credulous in accepting the myth of honor among thieves, as if organized criminals never cheat, inform on or brutally murder each other.
Pacino, in his third (and at least second too many) big gangster role, is a New York City Puerto Rican drug dealer who has just been freed after serving only five years of a 30-year drug sentence, thanks to a successful appeal mounted by his lawyer, Penn.
Pacino is determined to go straight, settle down with old flame Miller and move to the Bahamas to run a ear-rental agency. But he is honor-bound, to pay Penn back for springing him, and gels involved in a caper Penn is running against Italian mobsters.
As visually eloquent as DePalma is, showing vivid slices of Pacino's life in East Harlem, where he runs a disco to make legit money, writer David Koepp is verbally barren, producing a script that is an F-word festival; Leguizamo, as a young crook, even has one scene where he has to use the words "mis-(blank)ing-communication" and "mis-(blank)ing-understanding."
Pacino is still in strident, bark-and-bellow Scent of a Woman mode, throwing nuance to the winds. He never makes his character even remotely sympathetic as he tries to win over the hesitant Miller, another of those fair, smart, gorgeous Waspy women who end up with movie mobsters (see Diane Keaton in The Godfather and Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface).
That's true even though Miller, more overtly sensuous than she usually is without sacrificing any intelligence or grace, makes her devotion to Pacino almost credible—and makes the movie almost touching at times. Meanwhile Penn, so restrained he seems self-effacing by his standards, uses twitches and grins to convey the conflict of his character, a yuppie who envies and covets his gangster clients' opulent lifestyles even as he patronizes and scorns the clients themselves.
As usual, though, DePalma is as big a star as any of his actors, lapsing into black-and-white at one point and changing camera angle unaccountably. This is not to be confused with being in control. DePalma's Spanish-speaking characters switch capriciously from Spanish (with subtitles) to English, sometimes in midsentence. And one of his gimmicks—running a flash-forward under the opening credits—ends up tipping off the ending, which comes after a scintillating chase. By contrast with the earlier DePalma-Pacino gangster collaboration, the wildly romanticized, risibly violent Scarface, this is a plausible contemporary drama. But that is to damn it with very faint praise. (R)
Dennis Quaid, Meg Ryan, James Caan, Gwyneth Paltrow
There's so much to like and admire about Flesh and Bone, beginning with its quirky characters and lively dialogue, that the fact that it ultimately disappoints is doubly disappointing. The problem here is that although there's abundant flesh, as in atmosphere and personality, there's too little bone, in the form of ideas. This is essentially a one-issue movie, a film that explores the question, "Is evil necessarily passed on from one generation to the next?"
The movie, written and directed by the obviously talented Steve Kloves, opens with a prologue in which a west Texas farm family takes in for the night a mule boy who has shown up in their yard. While the family sleeps, the boy lets in his shotgun-wielding father (Caan) and together they begin robbing the house. When the robbery is interrupted, Caan blasts the family, sparing only a wailing infant girl. Cut to 30 years later when the boy, now an adult (Quaid), has settled into a dull, constricted life spent restocking vending machines in dusty Texas towns and sleeping with other men's wives. A chance encounter with Ryan, a hard-drinking woman on the run from an abusive husband, causes Quaid to confront his past. Why? Because Caan, the proverbial bad penny, turns up again and discovers that Ryan—can you hear the plot gears grinding?—is the spared baby all grown up.
Although the movie runs out of surprises about halfway through, there are still satisfactions to be had, beginning with first-rate performances from Quaid, Caan and, especially, the slithery Paltrow (daughter of Blythe Danner and TV producer Bruce Paltrow), who plays a devious woman given to stealing jewelry off corpses. An added kick comes from the casting of Scott Wilson, one of the killers from 1967's In Cold Blood, as an ex-con who lectures Quaid about the travails of being once guilty, forever suspected. The weak link is Quaid's real-life wife, Ryan: She tries hard, but the effort shows. (R)
Kathy Bales
Here are a couple of ways to pass the time while watching this movie, which is one part The Waltons, one part Where the Lilies Bloom and all parts ghastly: Count clichés or count Kathy Bates's kids. In either case, the number is high. Bates, the widow of a "no-good vagabond Irish Catholic son-of-a-bitch" who gave her nothing except grief and children (six to be exact), may be short on money, but moxie and dreams she has in abundance. She has long harbored a wish to get her family out of a squalid Los Angeles apartment and into a house that's "all bright and buttoned-up"—and all hers. Fired from her job at a potato-chip factory, the single-minded Bates, who's given to exhortations like "Pipe down," packs her brood into a old Plymouth and drives until she hits Hankston, Idaho. There she espies a parcel of land on which rests a shack with possibilities. No, she doesn't have the cash to buy the property but, as she says, "I've heard that the greenback dollar isn't the only way to get things done in this great country of ours."
The relentlessly manipulative A Home of Our Own follows a predictable path: Amid the hard scrabble existence, the shame of being the poorest kids in school, the internecine arguments and near tragedy, the family learns the true meaning of survival. The homespun hokum is all piled on pretty thick, and while Bales goes through her paces with utter, admirable conviction, she's planting orchids on a (movie) property that should have been condemned. (PG)
- Contributors:
- Ralph Novak,
- Leah Rozen,
- Joanne Kaufman.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
