Wiggly Socks Movie Reviews

by Linda Winsh-Bolard


Supposedly an Irish proverb: "May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you're dead."

Two brothers get separately into money crunch and decide to rob a jewelry shop. It is their parents shop, small, insured and in a suburban mall. The brothers reason that there is no danger involved, and as the insurance will pay their parents back, also no harm.

Predictably everything goes wrong and everything ends wrong.

The idea, possibly somehow remotely based on Mendenes case, seems to provide a new wrinkle in rob and run films, unfortunately it fail to grab the audience.

Major problems are the brothers themselves. Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the older, and the initiator of the crime, is fat, aging real estate guy who spends his money on nearly always dissatisfied, endlessly spending, ridiculously young wife (Marisa Tomei) and drugs. To supplement his income, he steals from the payroll of his employers and expects to get away with it. More, he feels entitled to everything with no effort. It is very hard to feel any sympathy for him. When he finally breaks into sobbing complaint about how his father simply did not love and support him enough, how he preferred his younger brother and how this is not fair, it is not even embarrassing. A man of his age blaming lack of fatherly love on his excesses comes across plain selfish and stupid.

His bother Hank (Ethan Hawke}doesn’t present better personality. Women and drugs are still the way to spend; he is just not stealing from his employer because he does not have a position to do it. Attempts to portray him as a poor man squeezed by former wife and his situation fail. Hank owes thousands in child support and feels no compunction to pay it, expecting his wife to provide for his daughter single-handed, his gambling and drug debts left me as cold as his affair with his brother’s gold digging wife.

If women were robbing and stealing to keep up young lovers, the filmmakers would ridicule them. It is time to accept that aging lover- dovers are equally ridiculous and deserve the same contempt if they believe that young hotties love anything but their bank account.

I could see some horrors or terror that would have put the brothers into the situation where they needed more easy money with any justification.
Perhaps that was the intention. If so, it distances the viewer considerably from compassion and as there is little else but those two it harms the film. For a successful melodrama the viewer has to feel some compassion with the protagonists facing crime-remorse-punishment scheme.

Their parents remain sketchy, despite the best effort of Albert Finney in the role of the Father Charles. They are not poor, nor absent, but there is little of their own story in the film. In the aftermath when Finney gets cold shoulder by the police and their lack of interest in the case drives to discover more that he bargained for, his anger is understandable, but we just don’t know enough about him to feel for him. He loved his wife, well, yes, that is nice but who is he?
And we had recently had the vigilante in the Brave One.

The format of the story does not help. We see the same events several times, in several time frames, through the eyes of various players, yet as we learn little new through all this, it just slows the tempo of the film. And it is a slow film. In over two hours, it could use some cutting and some speeding.

While it is advertised as a robbery that sets events off, most of the events were in place before the robbery took place and that makes it redundant.

It is filmed with plenty of long shots and descriptive shot as well as classically staged dialogs. The visuals are not good enough to let you forget the dragging tempo.
Adequately acted, again not so good as to distract you from the dripping minutes.

At the end, it might have the dubious honor of being the only boring film by Sydney Lumet.


ThinkFilm
Linsefilm, Michael Cerenzie Prods., Unity Prods.
Credits:
Director: Sidney Lumet
Screenwriter: Kelly Masterson
Producers: Michael Cerenzie, Brian Linse, Paul Parmar, William S. Gilmore
Executive producers: Bella Avery, Jane Barclay, David Bergstein, Janette Jensen Hoffman, Eli Klein, Hannah Leader, Jeffry Melnick, Sam Zaharis
Director of photography: Ron Fortunato
Production designer: Christopher Nowak
Music: Carter Burwell
Co-producers: Austin Chick, Jeff G. Waxman
Costume designer: Tina Nigro
Editor: Tom Swartwout
Cast:
Andy: Philip Seymour Hoffman
Hank: Ethan Hawke
Charles: Albert Finney
Gina: Marisa Tomei
Nanette: Rosemary Harris
Chris: Aleksa Palladino
Dex: Michael Shannon
Martha: Amy Ryan
Bobby: Brian F. O'Byrne
Running time -- 123 minutes
MPAA rating: R