|
film.com - no date
Strong acting helps tell twisted story | John Hartl
It's apparently impossible for Hollywood to come up with a movie based on
"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" without sugar-coating Mark Twain's
views on racism, child abuse, religious hypocrisy and ritualized violence.
But this wonderfully flavorful adaptation of Tobias Wolff's novel, based on the
author's experiences as a teenager in Seattle and Concrete in the 1950s, is
at least a respectable alternative. Like Twain's classic, it's not really a
children's book but a story about discovering one's own values in a hostile,
corrupt environment.
The Huck of this memoir is Toby, a restless boy who hits the road with his
newly divorced mother, Caroline (Ellen Barkin). Nearly penniless but free of
entanglements, they escape from Utah and her latest troubled boyfriend
(Chris Cooper) and head for Seattle just because the bus for Phoenix
requires too long a wait.
With no money coming in from her ex-husband, and Toby demonstrating far
too much potential for becoming a big-city juvenile delinquent, Caroline
decides to settle down with Dwight (Robert De Niro), a single father living with
his kids in the remote, oppressive town of Concrete.
It's the end of their open-road saga and the beginning of a domestic
nightmare. Dwight turns out to be an unctuous, insecure monster who
humiliates and abuses them both; they spend years putting up with his
cruelty while looking for an affordable exit.
Screenwriter Robert Getchell, who handled a similar mother-son relationship
in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, has done an incisive and generally
faithful job of condensing the book, capturing Toby's initial complicity with
Dwight, his fatalistic willingness to put up with a terrible situation, and the
boy's on-and-off friendship with an effeminate small-town wit named Arthur
(Jonah Blechman).
Some readers will mind that Getchell de-emphasizes Toby's worst traits,
makes Dwight's monstrous qualities loom larger, sweetens the ending and
does almost nothing to suggest that Dwight's kids have lives of their own. At
his worst, Getchell tends to simplify relationships that were richer and
stranger in the book.
Directed by Scottish filmmaker Michael Caton-Jones (Scandal), the movie
captures the 1950s in a wickedly precise, vividly anti-nostalgic style that's
been all but abandoned since The Last Picture Show made such
extraordinary use of it two decades ago. Getchell and Caton-Jones are
especially good at suggesting that Dwight's macho bluster isn't an isolated
trait, but the inevitable expression of a bullying conformist culture.
While De Niro isn't given much room to dig into Dwight's motivations, and he
may have played this kind of role too often, he's certainly creepy and
pathetic. It's almost as hard to read Caroline, but Barkin has no trouble
suggesting her independent spirit even under the worst of conditions.
What makes the movie truly remarkable are the performances of DiCaprio, a
veteran of television's "Growing Pains" who makes Toby both admirably
resilient and impossibly bratty, and Blechman, who instantly transforms a
recognizable type into much more than that. Together they've captured an
essential truth about the difficulties of maneuvering through the minefield of
adolescence in the twisted, overrated 1950s.
Thanks a lot to Gabi ! *
|