At Close Range

At Close Range
by James Foley

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DVD Reviews of At Close Range

DVD Review: well crafted morality play
Summary: 4 Stars

What makes this movie memorable is the setting (rural Pennsylvania, as far as I could tell) and its excellent deromanticizing of the criminal life. Consider it an anti-Godfather film; instead of the luscious sepia-toned interiors and National Geographic ethnic-portrait, period quality of Coppola's masterpiece, this is plain ol' America, this is the 70's, and this is crass, ordinary, everyday crime.

It's the same thing, really: Brad Whitewood Senior is a wannabe Godfather, but he's being shown without the ritual and romance of the Sicilian tradition. He's just a brutal, amoral thief, and his gang are all of the same stamp.

His son, already on his way to some kind of trouble in a going-nowhere back-of-beyond small town, is fascinated by Dad. Dad has money, Dad has fast cars. Dad has the keys to the good life; at home there's just Mom and Mom's downer boyfriend who gets upset if you smoke dope and make a racket at night when the rest of the family wants to sleep. What's a troubled teen to do? Run away to Dad, of course.

Walken does a terrific job as the charismatic but snake-evil Whitewood Senior. Though the accent seems to slip a bit at times, he has the charm and the blarney and the musical, (self)hypnotizing delivery of the practised con man. Penn is well-cast as the not-too-bright boy with ambitions beyond his abilities. The supporting cast is solid. The cinematography is a style and era that I find very enjoyable.

I was disappointed by the kitschy "back from the dead" ending. Admittedly, we can glimpse that the gunman sent to wipe out the last witness against dear old Dad is Patch, the most incompetent crook ever born; so it figures he would mess up even something so simple as a gangland shooting. But the heroic "bullet-ridden boy drags self across country to confront bad guy" sequence left me skeptical and bored rather than riveted. Based on a true story or not, it was hard to take.

Right up until that moment I was hooked, and I would have been fine with the film ending on the long still shot of the car sitting by the silent farmhouse in the night. However, we had to have the final confrontation, and I give the film makers credit for letting Whitewood Jr. pass his final moral test: rather than putting Dad away for good in the family tradition, he votes for law and order and chooses to testify in court. The courtroom scene at the end was for me more tense, and more genuinely moving, than the kitchen confrontation scene (though I admit the line "Is this the family gun?" was a winner!)

I give the film makers full marks for resisting the usual cloying Daddy/Sonny reconciliation schlock (probably typified at its saccharine worst in Lucas' Star Wars saga), instead voting for Sonny's eyes at last opening to the fact that Daddy is irredeemably wicked.

One thing that's a bit bothersome is the strongly implied rape of Whitewood Jr's girlfriend by Whitewood Sr. The incident is handled without a lot of exploitative detail, yet it's also quietly buried in the plot. We never know if the kid finds out about this; did she ever tell him? would she ever have told him? It certainly destroys any lingering shred of sympathy we might ever have had for Daddy, but the way it disappears completely from the plot is somehow disturbing, as if it was of no consequence in the end.

Well portrayed throughout is the appalling ignorance and gullibility of young boys, and their vulnerability to any kind of opportunistic manipulator. The film works well, I should think, as an antidote to any appeal that the life of crime might have for an adolescent viewer. It's a sharp, harsh moral tale about the kind of people you get involved with in that line of work, and though it's a lesser achievement than Coppola's classic, I have to admit that it is ethically a better work; it does not lure the viewer into sympathizing and identifying with ruthless criminals, instead it more sanely encourages us to see them as they are and pity or despise them.

It also paints a convincing portrait of the kind of dead-end rural poverty and semi-poverty that can make the life of crime seem dangerously attractive. Very American, very realistic, quite suspenseful, and of course Walken is revelling in his character's villainy and loopy, sociopathic, treacherous charm; the film would be worth the price of admission just to enjoy his performance. Penn I can take or leave, but Walken is very fine here.

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