BEFORE: Yeah, this Robert De Niro chain would have made a very good Father's Day chain, after all - my instincts were correct. The only problem was that I needed them to connect "Narrowsburg" to the rest of the year. I'm hoping I can find something else that's appropriate when June rolls around.
De Niro's off to an early lead in the standings for the year, with four appearances - but keep an eye on Dale Dickey, who may have six appearances before the month is over. But there's so much year left, and if I can do another Summer Rock & Doc Block, well, then all bets are off.
THE PLOT: While working in a Boston homeless shelter, Nick Flynn re-encounters his father, a con man and self-proclaimed poet. Sensing trouble in his own life, Nick wrestles with the notion of reaching out yet again to his dad.
AFTER: Well, this week's all about coincidence, I guess - like what are the odds of a school paper in France finding its way around the world to NYC and ending up in the jail cell of the ONE mobster that's going to recognize that joke about opera, and thus figure out where the mobster who turned evidence is hiding? What are the odds of a dead body from Long Island washing up on shore in Brooklyn, investigated by cop father of the junkie who tossed it in the ocean? Tonight we have to wonder - what are the odds that an absent father would turn up as a resident of the same homeless shelter where his adult son works? Actually, this seems like the most likely random coincidence of the three. Google's telling me there are 23 homeless shelters in Boston, so there you go, it's a start. Let's say there's about a 4% chance that if he went to a shelter, it would be that one.
We don't really have to calcuate the odds, because this is based on a true story, this is something that author Nick Flynn wrote about in a book titled "Another Bullshit Night in Suck City", which was published in 2004. So this happened to Flynn in the late 80's, his father got evicted and spent time on the streets, and ended up at the shelter where Nick was working (called the Harbor Street Shelter in the movie, but in real life it was Boston's Pine Street Inn.)
Look, I don't know what really happened in Nick Flynn's life or didn't happen, God knows a story goes through a lot of changes when you write it in a book, then turn that book into a movie. But in the movie, Nick's father Jonathan re-connects with him after many years, but only because he needs his help moving his furniture and effects into storage, after being evicted. One assumes that this had something to do with losing his cool over the noise made by the band downstairs practicing, and it turns out that there are probably better ways to deal with this situation than to break in with a baseball bat and start breaking guitars and heads.
I'm remembering that in the Brooklyn animation studio where I worked from 2016 to 2020, there was a recording studio next door that had not been properly sound-proofed, and the owner insisted that it wasn't preferable to use headphones, that his clients needed to experience the sound mixing at full volume, which made life unbearable for my boss who worked and lived next door. (Rumor had it that the Wu-Tang Clan was making an album there, but I was never able to confirm this.). My boss complained to the landlord, the city, the police, everyone she could think of, and tried every legal resource she could, to no avail. Her choices were to fight back with noise of her own, by pounding on the walls, or to do nothing and go quietly insane - so I get it. But violence is probably not the best solution to such a problem.
Anyway, after Jonathan gets the help from his son and his son's roommates to move his belongings, he's convinced that his many friends will welcome him as a houseguest, because of his vibrant spirit and reputation as a raconteur. But this turns out to not be the case, Jonathan is either delusional or perhaps just putting up a good front. Before long he's living out of his cab, which I'm sure was problematic for his passengers, and then once he fell asleep at the wheel and lost his hack license, he was living out on the streets. Much like James Franco's character in "City by the Sea", he always had vague plans to leave town any day now, and take a job that was waiting for him in Florida but probably didn't really exist.
Instead he entered the shelter system and was recognized by his son, and perhaps if it hadn't been for the moving day encounter a few months before, Nick might not have recognized his father at all in the shelter. Perhaps there have been many people who encountered relatives in the shelter system and not been aware of it at all. But then again, lost relatives sometimes manage to find each other accidentally, like those twins on "The Amazing Race" this past season who were Vietnamese girls adopted by different American families, and found each other decades later. Anyway, Nick finds it difficult to deal with his father, and Jonathan finds it difficult to adapt to life in the shelter.
Obviously, there are a lot of issues to sort through, namely the gulf caused by the years of absence and neglect, resentment and then you throw substance abuse issues on top of that (for both of them, Jonathan's an alcoholic, but Nick's in denial about his drug abuse). Then of course there's the issues around Nick's mother, who committed suicide years ago - Nick blames himself and Jonathan doesn't, chances are they're both wrong to some degree. Jonathan is also a racist and a homophobe, but remember this is set in the late 1980's, before PC culture really took hold - Boston used to be a much more conservative city before it became the liberal-thinking birthplace of the gay marriage movement. Still, there's no excuse for his petty hatred of things he doesn't understand.
Suddenly Nick can't handle working at the shelter, which makes his drug problem worse and his relationship suffers, and Jonathan's behavior becomes more erratic, and while some staffers are willing to forgive his rants and rule-breaking, Nick's in the majority of workers who vote to ban his father from the shelter. The whole time, I'm thinking, "Can't he just be sent to a DIFFERENT shelter?" Well, yeah, and the movie does get there, it just takes a while.
I just want to point out here that this film proves that it IS POSSIBLE to make a movie whose main character is a writer WITHOUT an endless number of shots of that writer writing, or worse, staring at a blank page while suffering from writer's block. Always, always (OK, almost always) I see films going back to this like it's a crutch, and the act of writing/typing is easily the LEAST interesting thing about writers. What's much more important is the LIVING, the rest of their life when they're not typing or staring at a blank page, because these are ACTIONS, which are more cinematic, and they are the things done that will end up inspiring that novel or script down the road. So everyone, please, let's see more of the living and less of the writing, because, yeah, writers write, but they also do other things, and they need to live, interact and be inspired before they can get something down on the page.
Think about your favorite band, would you rather see them writing a song, or performing the song that's already been written and rehearsed? Just saying. I want to taste the finished product, not learn how the sausage is made.
The opening part of the film was very confusing - both lead characters are writers, or one is and the other claims to be - so it starts out with both narrating their lives like chapter one of a book. But then one takes over for the other, so, umm, who's the lead here? We can really only follow one person's view of the world through the narration technique. Nick's character gets the flashbacks to his childhood without a father, so that gives him the edge here as the lead role, but you've GOT to pick one horse here and you can't change mid-stream, as they say. Then there are a few scenes of the father and son reuniting, but one of them is clearly a fantasy and didn't really happen - so that was very confusing, also.
I've got an uncle up in Massachusetts who's living in subsidized housing with his third wife, and something about De Niro's character here reminded me of him. He's not a blood relation, his first wife was my mother's sister, but she passed away and I gradually lost touch with him. When I was a kid I thought he was a great guy, but then he defaulted on two mortgages and didn't help with his son's college education, not one bit, so my opinion of him got drastically lowered over the years. His son, my cousin, is now living in my parents house rent-free, because he'd moved in with them years before, and I don't mind that he's there because it's a set of eyes on the house after my parents moved to a senior living apartment.
In Thanksgiving 2021, shortly after my parents moved to the facility in the next town, my wife and I drove up to cook a turkey dinner for them, and while there, I got a call from my uncle (is he still my uncle after my aunt died?) and so I invited him over for a Black Friday meal of leftovers. After I got off the phone, my mind put two and two together and realized that he probably had designs on my parents house, like why else would he mention that he's living in Section 8 housing? Nevertheless, I invited him in, we had a nice meal together and I put all thoughts of him being a complete weasel out of my mind - until, on his way out the door, he asked me point-blank what was going to happen to the house. AHA, I was right in the first place! But why would I let him live there, if he'd lost two houses already in his life? How could I know he wouldn't strip the house and sell everything in it, down to the copper wiring? Forget it, I know I should be a charitable person and such, but I just don't trust the guy. Maybe if he was homeless I'd take him to a shelter, but letting him live in my parents' house, assuming that's what he wanted to do, just seemed like a bit too much. Bear in mind my parents had moved out just a month before this, though - my parents would probably have taken him in, they've had all kinds of people staying over for extended periods of time, but I am just not my parents, who are far too trusting.
Also starring Paul Dano (last heard in "The Guilty"), Julianne Moore (last seen in "Carrie" (2013)), Olivia Thirlby (last seen in "The Stanford Prison Experiment"), Eddie Rouse (last seen in "I'm Still Here"), Steve Cirbus (last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), Lili Taylor (last seen in "I Shot Andy Warhol"), Victor Rasuk (last seen in "The Mule"), Liam Broggy, Chris Chalk (last seen in "Godzilla vs. Kong"), Wes Studi (last heard in "Soul"), Thomas Middleditch (last seen in "Zombieland: Double Tap"), Dale Dickey (last seen in "Message from the King"), Dawn McGee, Billy Wirth (last seen in "The Lost Boys"), Michael Gibson, Kelly McCreary (last seen in "Life" (2015)), Katherine Waterston (last seen in "Robot & Frank"), Jane Lee, Rony Clanton (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Michael Buscemi (last seen in "BlacKkKlansman"), WIlliam Sadler (last seen in "Man on a Ledge"), Samira Wiley (last seen in "Breaking News in Yuba County"), Stuart Rudin, Thomas Hoffman, Dwight Folsom.
RATING: 5 out of 10 games of catch with Mom's boyfriends
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