Desperado The Brothers McMullen
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN Richard Alleva BOYS WITH CAMERAS 'Desperado' & 'The Brothers McMullen' I told him not to do it (see, Commonweal, July 16,1993). But he went right ahead and did it! Why don't movie...
...There is no suspense in Desperado, little wit, and none of the sanguinary lyricism Sam Peckinpah brought to The Wild Bunch or even the sheer hatred that infused Oliver Stone's disgusting Natural Born Killers...
...The other two boys twist it to mean that you shouldn't commit yourself to anyone...
...But the scenes between men and women feature too many lines like, "Do you think we've lost the romance in our marriage...
...Burns never loses track of his theme, but he pursues it only doggedly, without making any of the intuitive leaps that render a story truly interesting...
...In El Mariachi, the novice director Robert Rodriguez told a story fit for a comic book, and I don't mean one of those newfangled "graphic novels" but the old-fashioned, blotchy, low-down, subliterate kind...
...Bad guys shoot at him, he ducks, finds a gun, shoots back, gets saved by a pretty girl, ducks more bullets...
...How many shades of red does blood have...
...When a filmmaker has to kill off the best actor in sight in order to keep his movie commercially viable, he's in big trouble, no matter how much money Desperado makes...
...The director himself gives the film's worst performance as Barry...
...Bang bang...
...I observed in my review, "nobody in this film can so much as dive into a pool or flop down on a bed without Rodriguez showing the simplest action from a zillion different angles...
...And that's it...
...But, let me hasten to add, it's not capitalism that has done in Rodriguez but a basic story-telling blunder...
...Curiously, only her youngest son, Patrick, understands the positive side of her warning-cleave only to the one you truly love...
...Perhaps Robert Rodriguez and Edward Burns should have lunch together...
...Naturally, peacemaker Buscemi has to be killed off a third of the way through so that Banderas must head on the vengeance trail...
...Burns shows some promise as a writer...
...Jack the Giant Killer has turned into Giant the Giant Killer...
...In his scenes with Maxine Bahms, both actors commit the cardinal vocal sin of realistic acting: they unconsciously pick up each other's rhythms and pitches instead of working for contrast and variety...
...And sometimes not even that...
...And it's a high-tech bore...
...Take that opening scene with Mrs...
...Without it, he has none, only efficiency...
...That's not as much fun...
...Even the idealistic Patrick is about to marry for convenience rather than love...
...What we have in Desperado is just another slick, faultlessly crafted and totally uninteresting blood bath...
...Rodriguez didn't shoot enough footage, apparently...
...When he has an actor sit down on a bed during a chat, the placement seems a mechanical attempt at visual variety rather than a natural act arising out of the situation...
...Fine...
...The other has humanistic fervor...
...But if the story was elementary, Rodriguez was a veritable rocket scientist when it came to low-budget filmmaking...
...The entire setting goes to waste...
...Burns had wanted to shoot it in the context of a funeral cortege but, unable to afford extras or costumes, he settled for a simple confrontation in an otherwise deserted cemetery...
...I'm afraid to guess...
...Working under spartan conditions, the independent filmmaker can succeed in two ways: he or she can be, like Rodriguez, a virtuoso of photography and editing...
...We never find out because Burns turns her into a standard soap opera predator...
...The Brothers McMullen has neither...
...You can't tell if mother and son are standing near the grave or have walked away from it...
...Rather than rejoicing each time he escapes, we're supposed to be turned on by the sheer volume of slaughter...
...Does she want such love for herself, or does she have a pathological hatred of married love...
...The Brothers McMullen would seem to be the antithesis of, and the antidote to, movies like Desperado...
...But, having made that decision, he established no geographic relation between his actors and the grave of the unloved dead man whose baleful influence is to be felt throughout the rest of the movie...
...then he waffles...
...For Edward Burns's film was made on a miniscule budget, has no special effects, and is packed with heart-to-heart confessions and confrontations instead of bullets and bad guys...
...And Burns doesn't follow through on his more interesting insights...
...Kiss kiss...
...A low budget doesn't excuse this...
...One has technical flash...
...Burns might just as well have staged it in a kitchen or on a porch...
...You can sense Rodriguez's desperation when he has his characters go in for corpse abuse, with Banderas slamming a dead man's head against a bar and shooting an already lifeless foe tumbling down some steps...
...So the only good thing in all this carnage is a funny monologue expertly delivered by an endearing actor...
...With more bucks to spend, Rodriguez can now move his camera, pan and dolly and zoom, and achieve longer takes, and he doesn't have to resort to jigsaw-puzzle editing...
...How many ways can bodies fall...
...In the last scene, a weapon case tossed away from a highway suddenly reappears a few shots later right back on the highway...
...But that jigsaw-puzzle editing was Rodriguez's only claim to style...
...They might quarrel each other into accomplishing something truly interesting...
...Connie Britton turns the forbidding role of Jack's Perfect Wife into a completely believable woman...
...All the better if the director can display both filmic know-how and dramatic depth...
...There are eight significant characters, but only two of them are well acted...
...But dramatic potency isn't guaranteed by a tight budget...
...Some of the joshing and jabbing among the brothers has the right rough-housing camaraderie...
...After all, we have only their best interests at heart...
...Given his budget, Burns quite rightly opted for simple set-ups with minimal movement, but he hasn't learned how to use composition and movement to subtly inflect a scene...
...Jack, the eldest, is in love with his wife but cheats on her, while Barry hops from bed to bed...
...What's next on the ultraviolent movie scene...
...Why don't movie directors listen to film critics...
...McMullen tells her middle child, Barry, that she is returning to Ireland to live with the sweetheart of her youth, and she warns her son that he must never "make the same mistake I made...
...But, knowing that Rodriguez had been offered a deal by Columbia to remake his movie with a bigger budget, I also feared he would "end up making something as well upholstered as Dave...
...Comparisons with Woody Allen have been overdone, but Burns does have a similar wry wit about his ethnicity and religion...
...The net result isn't arty, though, just jangling and kind of fun...
...The rest of the movie shows the brothers, laboring under a heavy load of Irish-Catholic guilt, slowly but surely coming to a realization of what their mother's warning really meant...
...In El Mariachi, the exhilaration of the fighting sequences was in seeing how the lovably bumbling hero escaped, not in how many guys he killed...
...It's a kung-fu flick with bullets instead of karate chops...
...The only scene that entertains is the first one, in which the hero's nonviolent pal, played by Steve Buscemi, keeps a barful of toughs spellbound by a tall tale as he cadges beers from a grumpy bartender...
...Jennifer Jostyn, as the woman who wins Patrick, has a smile that could light up Stockholm in midwinter but needs to stop relying on it...
...Britton possesses uncloying, almost piercing sweetness...
...Jack Mulcahy, as the married McMullen, has craggy authority and conveys the quiet agony of a good man suddenly aware of the friability of his moral backbone...
...For instance, the sexual adventuress who almost torpedoes Jack's marriage is first smitten with him when she hears Jack deliver a gracious birthday toast to his wife...
...El Mariachi cost $7,000...
...A naive young guitarist walks into a cutthroat town and is mistaken for a hired killer toting a gun inside his guitar case...
...It would be a pleasure to eat my words, but alas, I am proved a prophet...
...In Desperado, the revamped hero, now played by glamorous Antonio Banderas, knows how to handle a gun right from the start of the movie...
...His direction lacks invention and sometimes even common sense...
...Cubism for kids...
...Old habits die hard...
...The two simply face each other and talk...
...McMullen and Barry...
...or-like the young Woody Allen or John Cassavetes-he must rely on a script of such power or wit (fleshed out, of course, by good acting) that we put up with less-than-elegant imagery...
...Desperado is too violent to be taken as a parody of the action movie genre, yet it's too facetious to be taken straight...
...Near the grave of her newly deceased and always unloved husband, Mrs...
Vol. 122 • October 1995 • No. 17
