Somebodies

By Frank Rich

BLOODBROTHERS

Directed by Robert Mulligan Screenplay by Walter Newman

In the heyday of Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck, Hollywood beguiled audiences with sentimental tales of working-class women who dreamed of escape to a better life. These days the genre lives on, but in a much revised form. Instead of women, the protagonists of these films are now men, young Italian studs who break out of ethnic urban ghettos to become Somebodies. It's a formula that has already produced a pair of smash movies, Rocky and Saturday Night Fever, as well as new stars to go with them. Bloodbrothers is the latest entry in this sweepstakes, and it too has a fresh young actor, Richard Gere, in the lead. If lightning fails to strike a third time, it is not that the formula is tired; it's that Bloodbrothers is a mess.

Gere plays Stony De Coco, a 19-year-old who still lives with his suffocating parents in the antiseptic, concrete high-rises of The Bronx. Should Stony continue the family tradition and become a construction worker? Or should he follow his desires and become a white-collar counselor to infirm children? A simple dilemma, but Bloodbrothers takes forever to resolve it. There is so much clutter in this movie that it is often difficult to find Stony amidst the underbrush.

Screenwriter Walter Newman, adapting Richard Price's tough novel, has no use for dramatic efficiency or synthesis. Besides Stony's story, he tells in lavish detail the histrionic tales of the hero's psychotic mother (Lelia Goldoni), his anorectic kid brother (Michael Hershewe), his sexually troubled dad (Tony Lo Bianco) and his defeated uncle (Paul Sorvino). Newman, like Price, wants to make a larger sociological point about the breakdown of oldtime immigrant values in chaotic modern America, but he overstates the case. Bloodbrothers has so much narrative, most of it melodramatic, that every scene becomes a climax, every speech a tragic monologue. Each psycho logical motive is spelled out; no events are left to the audience's imagination. As a result we remain outside the characters and eventually start to question their authenticity. The film's ending-- true to formula but false to Price's novel -- destroys whatever credibility remains.

Robert Mulligan (Summer of '42) can be a first-rate film maker, but his world here suffers from a bad miscalculations. Trying for what appears to be an expressionistic style, he has directed the movie at a screeching pitch. He matches the script's verbal and physical violence blow for blow with slam-bang editing and ; pounding musical score; he never give the audience a chance to catch its breath. What is intended to be operatic come out overblown and, at times, overacted Goldoni's Mom is so crazed she seems to have stepped out of Exorcist II.

For all the movie's convulsions, some fine acting does peek through. Sorvino has a rending moment when he begs Stony's forgiveness for horrors committed by his mad brother. While too young to pass for Gere's father, Lo Bianco creates a frightening portrait of a once settled man who has lost his bearings. Marilu Henner, in the Talia Shire/Karen Lynn Gorney role is refreshingly direct as the only self-aware person onscreen. As for Richard Gere, the jury is still out. Here, more than in Days of Heaven, he is a powerful sexual presence. His scenes with the film's child actors are convincingly tender. But bad habits plague him: he affects too many Brando pauses, De Niro stutterings and Travolta grins. He may yet become a Somebody in movies, but not until he stops acting like everybody else.

-- Frank Rich

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