Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s installment of A Movie A Day.
[For those now joining us, A Movie A Day is my attempt at filling in gaps in my film knowledge. My DVD collection is thousands strong, many of them films I haven’t seen yet, but picked up as I scoured used DVD stores. Each day I’ll pull a previously unseen film from my collection or from my DVR and discuss it here. Each movie will have some sort of connection to the one before it, be it cast or crew member.]
Today we follow director Sidney Lumet over from yesterday’s Agatha Christie murder mystery MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS to an ‘80s drama called DANIEL.
The title character is played by Timothy Hutton (this was his follow-up to TAPS) who is the son of a husband and wife who were very politically active in the ‘40s and ‘50s… so much so that they were fingered as communists (they were), accused of stealing atomic secrets, tried (without any proof), convicted and given the chair.
I saw a documentary a while back called HEIR TO AN EXECUTION all about the Rosenbergs, a real life couple who were tried and killed during the Red Scare and I kept drawing parallels between that movie and this one only to read the back of the DVD and see that I couldn’t claim being super smart since they explicitely state this is a fictional telling of what it could have been like for the children of the Rosenbergs.
In this movie it’s the Isaacsons instead of the Rosenbergs and they’re played by Mandy Patinkin (pre-Inigo Montoya) and Lindsay Crouse (of SLAP SHOT fame). Lumet and screenwriter EL Doctorow (who also wrote the book this film was based on) split the narrative between Patinkin and Crouse’s story, told in sepia-toned flashbacks, and their grown son’s story.
The Isaacsons had a son and daughter, the grown versions played by Hutton and Amanda Plummer who are all kinds of fucked up by the experience of seeing their mother and father taken away by the FBI.
Plummer has externalized all her troubles, finding different outlets to vent her frustration and anger at what she views as the state murdering her parents. She’s involved in all sorts of protests, mostly protesting Vietnam. Her parents were revolutionaries, protesting the government in their day, so she figures she’s keeping their memory and spirit alive by doing her own part to fight the establishment.
Daniel, on the other hand, internalizes his anger and confusion, putting on a cool exterior, but he becomes quite the prick in the process. He has a short temper and spends the rest of the time being sarcastic or condescending or both.
The movie’s over 2 hours runtime has us discover the character of Daniel’s parents pretty much as he does, either by remembering bits and pieces from his childhood or finding out about them from their surviving friends, relations, enemies, accusers, supporters and acquaintances.
As you would expect, Hutton’s character arc is the driving force of the film, but I’m not sure how different he is by the end of the film. Sure, he is forced to examine himself by certain events, usually pertaining to his sister’s self-destructive tendencies, but ultimately we don’t get a radical 180 change… the character just makes peace with the reality (or possible reality) of who his parents were and what they stood for.
There’s a lot of ambiguity in the movie, especially when it comes to finding out the truth about the Isaacsons. How much of the Government’s case against them was true, how much fabricated? We don’t get answers to these questions and in Hutton’s search for information on his parents and the case against them he hears both sides, sure that they were guilty, sure that they were innocent and some that think the reality was a little bit of both.
This is a really solid little flick, but it’s not one I completely fell for. It feels like it is straining to be an epic story about a family, along the same lines as THE GODFATHER, but without the characters, photography, score or story to really succeed on that level.
The performances are all great across the board, with the possible exception being Ilan Mitchell-Smith as Young Daniel. Ilan’s not bad by any means and is actually a very charming kid in the movie, but he’s a tad one-note. You’ll remember Ilan Mitchell-Smith as Anthony Michael Hall’s BFF in WEIRD SCIENCE a few years later.
The highlight, though, is the work by Mandy Patinkin. He plays Paul Isaacson with the perfect amount of likability so that you really do take a hit emotionally when you see the hell that befalls him and his family.
Hutton hold the movie together well and has a few exceptional moments, like his introductory arugment with his sister over the dinner table. Plummer is surprisingly strong here as well… she can play tortured and a little bat-shit insane with the best of ‘em. Ellen Barkin has a very small, but sympathetic role as Daniel’s mistreated wife, Ed Asner is pretty great as the Isaacsons’ lawyer, doing everything he can to do right by the kids of his clients whom he believes he let down and Lindsay Crouse does a great job as the mother of the children, caught up in the same shit as her husband.
Final Thoughts: This movie is an easy one to recommend to a certain type of film-watcher. If you like dramas at all or political dramas, specifically about the communist witch-hunt, then this is a no-brainer. It’s a movie that shouldn’t be as obscure as it is, but it also doesn’t set the world aflame. Some strong performances, an interesting, but short-of-epic story and solid direction by Lumet make this good, but not great movie.
Here’s what we have lined up for the next week:
Friday, November 14th: EL DORADO (1967)
Saturday, November 15th: THE GAMBLER (1974)
Sunday, November 16th: ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1984)
Monday, November 17th: SALVADOR (1986)
Tuesday, November 18th: BEST SELLER (1987)
Wednesday, November 19th: THE HOLCROT COVENANT (1985)
Thursday, November 20th: BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ (1962)
Tomorrow we follow Ed Asner over to EL DORADO! See you folks then!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
