★★★★★
18 June 2012
This article is a review of A BRONX TALE. |
“You did a good thing for a bad man.”
A BRONX TALE (1993) is getting the Blu-ray treatment. I’m surprised how much I thoroughly enjoyed this film. I’d stayed away from the directorial debut of one of the greatest screen actors of all time (fighting for that title against Brando, Streep and Day-Lewis). From the snippets and artwork it looked like GOODFELLAS watered-down. How wrong I was. It is an intimate story about the influence two men have over one person, aged nine and 17, Calogero: his father Lorenzo (Robert De Niro) and the local gangster big-wig, Sonny (Chazz Palminteri). Think HALF NELSON. De Niro, not only directs, but produces and stars. Palminteri also writes the screenplay, adapting it from his autobiographical one-man play.
A BRONX TALE (1993) is getting the Blu-ray treatment. I’m surprised how much I thoroughly enjoyed this film. I’d stayed away from the directorial debut of one of the greatest screen actors of all time (fighting for that title against Brando, Streep and Day-Lewis). From the snippets and artwork it looked like GOODFELLAS watered-down. How wrong I was. It is an intimate story about the influence two men have over one person, aged nine and 17, Calogero: his father Lorenzo (Robert De Niro) and the local gangster big-wig, Sonny (Chazz Palminteri). Think HALF NELSON. De Niro, not only directs, but produces and stars. Palminteri also writes the screenplay, adapting it from his autobiographical one-man play.
A BRONX TALE is effectively two parts, seamlessly melded. Beginning in 1960, and then later jumping to 1968. It is an emotional and brilliantly acted coming-of-age tale. Lorenzo is an honest bus driver, and attempts to instil a sense of working class dignity in his son – salary earned through a day’s work is something to take pride in, and is heroic in its own way. The money and apparent ease of Sonny’s existence exert a tremendous pull however. After witnessing, and not ratting on, the latter murdering someone, Calogero comes onto his radar in a paternalistic way. None of these three males are simplistically portrayed. The writing and performances leave no choice but to empathise and sympathise with their situations as they make their way through life. De Niro’s direction is energetic and playful; a sharp contrast to his follow-up 13 years later – THE GOOD SHEPHERD is glacial in its cold, clinical portrait – an understandable, of course, switch on the thermostat warmth setting.
Ostensibly in the gangster genre, is really just an entertaining context to explore manhood, inter-generational conflict, and America in the 1960s evolving so fast in one decade. A BRONX TALE is about interactions over slick violence.
Oh yeah, and I love these characters.