On Screen

...Thus the much revered bishop (John Cromwell) who performs the ceremony is quickly shown to be senile...

...He spends a great deal of time, for example, lingering on irrelevant objects or people in the foreground of a scene after the principal characters have departed—perhaps because he simply doesn't know how to end a sequence...

...The real treat was watching Paul Sorvino as Stony's uncle, Chubby...

...at the same time they also try to thwart his every effort to leave home, go to college, or make a living without following in his father's footsteps...

...Richard Gere acts passably well in the lead role, although he lacks the range to express both the false bravado and the tortured indecisiveness of the character...

...On Screen EMBARRASSING AMERICA BY ROBERT ASAHINA N jl ^ o one can dispute Robert Altman's mastery of his craft—his control of overlapping dialogue on multiple sound tracks, for instance, or his understanding of the subtleties of editing and cinematography...

...But the chief blame forthefailureof Bloodbrolhers must lie with Walter Newman, who wrote the screenplay...

...His latest film, A Wedding, is similarly disappointing—despite the fact that it was chosen to fill the opening night slot at this year's New York Film Festival—the first American work accorded that honor since 1969...

...This forces Annette (Marilu Henner), the "town pump" with a heart of gold who is intent on helping Stony escape the suffocating embrace of his family, to mouth inanities ("Life can hurt like hell") that are either not present at all in the novel or are rendered in quite different form...

...It took me a while to grasp why these and several other oddities were chosen to appear in A Wedding...

...In a film that has 48 roles laying more or less equal claim to our attention, some way must be found for the audience to identify the characters during the brief vignette each is permitted...

...Altman's solution is to use either unknowns with physically distinctive features or actors who are already well-known to audiences...

...The groom's dowager grand aunt (Ruth Nelson) is unmasked as a crazy radical rabble-rouser...

...Regrettably, very little of this blue-collar Biidungsroman is to be found in the film adaptation...

...When I first read the novel, I kept picturing Richard Castellano in the part...

...In the earlier movie, the 24 main characters developed along parallel and intersecting lines that were ultimately unified by the discipline of Joan Tewkesbury's script...

...Altman, apparently thinking that there is nothing more ridiculous than a middle-aged woman who is on the verge of having an affair, has Mrs...

...As the reception is winding down, we see the car that was meant to be a wedding gift speeding away from the family house...

...Brenner announce to her would-be lover (Pat McCormick): "We must talk...

...The sweet old matriarch of the groom's family (Lillian Gish) is revealed after her sudden death to have been a petty tyrant...

...Stony is urged by his parents to become a man, a breadwinner...

...and Farrow, who is burdened with the director's odd notion that imitating catatonia is the best way to convey the mysterious meaning of womanhood...

...This banal material might have been redeemed by ingenious treatment...

...In the summer after his graduation from high school, he must decide whether or not to accept the fate that his 18 years in the Bronx have virtually dictated for him: to join his father's union as an apprentice electrician and to stay in the old neighborhood, hanging out with the same friends at the same bars and discos...

...Temptation was thrust upon me in the form of you...

...Moreover, because Altman and company are considerably less interested in reality than they are in caricature, their prejudices are as hackneyed as their story devices...

...Price crudely but effectively conveys the contradictory demands and smothering affections of working-class ethnic parents whose children grow up discontented precisely because the economic well-being that the father has worked so hard to attain permits a glimpse of a different life beyond the family ties...

...In the latter category are Dina Merrill, whose perfect wasp appearance as the groom's aunt provides a lot of visceral information the director does not have to labor to convey, and Burnett, who at least acquits herself honorably in a part that is meant to be laughed at rather than with...

...Yet I doubt anyone could have done as well as Sorvino in the scene where Chubby explains to Stony, at great length and in graphic detail, why Italians are better "stickmen" than any other immigrant group...

...Nevertheless, if the scene where he tells stories to hospitalized children is a little hard to believe in the book, it is incredible in the movie...

...Some of the other performers are merely peculiar-looking...

...A JL jLnother American entry at the Festival was Bloodbrolhers, directed by Robert Mulligan from the recent best-seller by Richard Price...

...The movie begins with the marriage of Muffin Brenner (Amy Stryker), daughter of a nouveau riche Southern couple (Carol Burnett and Paul Doo-ley), to Dino Corelli (Desi Arnaz Jr...

...The bride's uncle (Gerald Busby), a minister, has a sordid past that he is only too willing to relate to anyone who will listen...

...One need only compare A Wedding to Nashville to get an idea of why Altman has failed...

...An egregious example was 3 Women, which was as lacking in meaningful content and devoid of coherence as it was full of squandered talent...

...The trusted family doctor (Howard Duff) has a drinking problem, as well as roving eyes and hands...

...Still, with his shaggy eyebrows and Roman nose, his ancestry could never be in doubt...

...Burnett deserves better, and so does Robert Altman's audience...

...Some of the fault here may lie with Price: Stony, like many semi-autobiographical heroes, may simply be an unrealistic combination of sensitivity and strength...

...Miller with his work for other directors to see how much even a gifted cameraman can owe Altman...

...Three actresses are particularly embarrassed: Lauren Hutton (as the producer of the film of the wedding), whom the script literally forces to fall flat on her face...

...Newman's most unforgivable blunder, though, was changing the conclusion of the story...

...And others in the film suffer similarly...

...Newman rearranges all of the plot elements so that the protagonist finally and heroically leaves home with his little brother—a sentimental affirmation of independence that makes a mockery of Stony's coming of age...

...As the rites and the subsequent reception proceed, we learn more than we ever wanted to know about the families and their complicated interrelationships...

...These crude contrasts go on almost ad infinitum, and certainly ad nauseam without in any way developing the characters, for the flip-flopping from white to black is not motivated by any artistic logic...

...The novel's semiautobiographical protagonist, Stony De Coco, is at a crucial point in his young manhood...

...And the husband (Timothy Thomerson) of one of her bridesmaids (Lesley Rogers) is romancing another one (Marta Hef-lin...

...Later, the automobile is shown crushed and burning under a truck on the highway...

...The single coherent element to the screenplay of A Wedding is the unanimous, smirking condescension of the four coauthors toward Middle America, its inhabitants, and their lives...

...Dennis Christopher, who plays the bride's epileptic brother, and Beverly Ross, who plays his nurse, are equally strange in appearance...

...Mulligan is best known for sentimental box-office favorites like To Kill a Mockingbird, Up the Down Staircase, and especially Summer of '42...

...Compare Vilmos Zsigmond's photography in McCabe and Mrs...

...Her bony body, buck teeth, bug eyes, and red hair makes Stryker—in her profession-aldebut—a cross between another Alt-man "discovery," Shelley Duvall, and one of the director's favorites, Sissy Spacek...

...The groom himself has had an affair with his new wife's unmarried sister (Mia Farrow), who turns out to be pregnant—though not, apparently, by him...

...In the movie, there is no real conflict between Sto-ny's aspirations and the claims of his family...

...son of a wasp mother (Nina Van Pal-landt) and an Italian father (Vittorio Gassman...

...he did not have to exaggerate his ethnicity by constantly waving his arms and shrugging his shoulders...

...Since we see practically everything else that is going on at the wedding reception, including intimate activities, that we were not shown the couple climbing into the car seems like an especially cheap trick...

...As for the acting, Altman's Law prevails here as in his other films: Strong performers triumph over the skimpy material...

...It is abruptly and arbitrarily revealed, however, that the couple in the vehicle was the groom's ex-girlfriend and his former roommate...

...One cannot help suspecting that he was simply the wrong director for this gritty and mostly unflinching story...

...But, as has often been noted, in the medium of film the technology has advanced far beyond the art, and Altman's chief failing has been his frequent inability to exploit his expertise in a manner that gives significant form to his material...

...weak actors are made to look foolish by it...

...Tony Lo Bianco is much better as Stony's macho father...

...Even the movie's only surprise, a case of mistaken identity, is unearned...

...we and the film families are therefore led to believe that the newlyweds have perished in a senseless accident...

...His proper maiden aunt (Virginia Vestoff) has a secret that is not long in coming out: She is in love with the family's black manservant (Cedric Scott...

...I succumbed...

...His first big mistake was adapting Price's lengthy descriptive passages by turning them into dialogue—absolutely the clumsiest technique possible...

...Viveca Lindfors (as the cateress), who is allowed to overact even more wildly than she usually does...

...Instead, the movie is sluggishly propelled through its seemingly interminable two hours and four minutes by a single plot mechanism: For every one of the 48 principal characters, Altman and his collaborators on the screenplay (John Considine, Patricia Resnick and Allan Nicholls) have created a stereotype that they then predictably undermine with another stereotype...

...In the novel, Stony eventually comes to recognize his parents' pathological love, yet decides to accept his dismal lot after realizing that his family, especially his younger brother, needs him at home more than he needs to leave them—that he is effectively already a responsible adult compared to all of them...