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Roommates

Directed by Peter Yates. Written by Max Apple and Stephen
Metcalfe. Starring Peter Falk, D.B. Sweeney, Julianne Moore and
Ellen Burstyn.

If Roommates wasn’t a true story, someone almost certainly would
have dreamed it up.

Based on the relationship of writer Max Apple and his
grandfather, the scenario follows a boy and his grandfather through
three intense, tumultuous decades, highlighted by Peter Falk’s
performance as grandfather Rocky Holeczek.

Set in Pittsburgh, the film begins when 7-year-old Michael is
orphaned after his parents die in tragic succession. His Polish
immigrant grandfather Rocky resolves to take him in.

The old man and the young boy forge a close but tempestuous
friendship, played out in their debates, their arguments and their
drawn-out gin games, most of which Rocky, a stubborn but lovable
curmudgeon, insists on winning.

Flash forward some years and a grown-up Michael (D.B. Sweeney)
is away at medical school. His aunt summons him to Pittsburgh when
Rocky’s apartment building is scheduled to be demolished and the
old man refuses to leave.

Michael offers to take Rocky in, effectively returning the favor
his grandfather did him 20 years earlier. Rocky’s most emotionally
charged meeting comes with Beth (Julianne Moore), Michael’s feisty,
liberal girlfriend. The conservative Rocky doesn’t approve, and he
feels displaced, especially when the drunk couple come home to make
love. Scolds Rocky, awakened in the next room, "You didn’t tell me
I was moving into a bordello!" But when Rocky backs down and gives
the couple his blessing, Michael and Beth get married, an amusing
sequence in itself. Eventually they move away and have
children.

Yet grandfather and grandson will be roommates once again as the
young couple invite Rocky, then nearing 100, to live with them.

Roommates only really falters in this last sequence, when it
gets unabashedly sentimental. And the feel-good message at the
picture’s end is a reminder that yes, Disney was involved in this
film.

Still, the film should be forgiven its sappy ending. It has
strong performances from Moore and Sweeney, given the tough role of
straight man to Falk’s eccentric Rocky. Ellen Burstyn, as Beth’s
frosty mother, has the thankless task of playing a totally
unsympathetic character, and she is believable.

Falk is just this side of caricature as Rocky, veering
precariously close to going over the top, but reining in the
character when necessary. He clearly relishes the role, sinking his
teeth into the performance. This is a feat, since the 107-year-old
Rocky doesn’t have any teeth.

By Lael Loewenstein

Once Were Warriors

Written and directed by Lee Tamahori

Starring Rena Owen, Temuera Morrison and Mamengaroa
Kerr-Bell

First, let it be said that New Zealand import Once Were Warriors
is one of the greatest films of the last five years, easy. Possibly
10. This portrait of a dysfunctional Maori family spinning its
wheels in urban New Zealand is certainly one of the most
emotionally lacerating popular films since Boyz ‘N the Hood. That
film’s performances, however, gripping as they were, absolutely
pale next to Warriors’ Rena Owen and Temuera Morrison.

But this is not to say the film is perfect. Once Were Warriors
has problems, ugly, ugly problems exasperating insofar as they are
inexpiable. However, it is the rare film that makes one care enough
to wish it were otherwise, as this one does.

Beth Heke (Owen) is just trying to make ends meet for her
impoverished family. Husband Jake (Morrison) doesn’t help by
getting laid off from jobs, throwing wild parties for his lowlife
drinking buddies and beating Beth severely. Despite the
unsupportive family environment, their 13-year-old daughter Grace
(Mamengaroa Kerr-Bell) has cultivated quite a talent for writing.
Firstborn Nig and younger brother Boogie have not yet found such
positive outlets for their anti-social tendencies: Boogie’s
(Tuangaroa Emile) several misdemeanors land him in juvenile hall,
Nig (Julian Arahanga) forsakes family for his
comrades-in-tattooed-arms, the Toa gang.

Warriors chronicles the Hekes’s sundry misadventures, from Nig’s
painful induction into the Toas, to Boogie’s training in a Maori
war dance, to the family’s ill-fated road-trip to see Boogie. Alas,
the fine people Fine at Line Pictures have asked that reviewers not
reveal the film’s one critical plot turn. It can be said that there
is a death in the family which causes Beth to look long and hard at
her marriage to the truculent Jake.

The decision is not easy. Jake is a drunk and a wife-beater, but
he possesses undeniable charisma. At this point one must take off
his hat to Temuera Morrison. A lesser actor might have made Jake
wholly repugnant, thus transforming Warriors into a flat melodrama
of Beth’s escape from a crude Punchinello. But Morrison’s Jake is
Minotaurean, savagely noble, and his labyrinthine despair leaves us
unable to reject him out of hand.

Rena Owen’s Beth, however, is unforgettable. She scorches the
frame in anger, softens it in sorrow and when she smiles she leaves
it glowing like autumn. No kidding. Watching her and Morrison spar
and reconcile for roughly two hours is a modern miracle of honest
acting.

Their efforts are hamstrung, however, by chronic and
ill-considered cinematic cliche, television cliche even. Jake’s
fits, for instance, are often accompanied by a less than tasteful
electric guitar lick. Appropriate perhaps for Andrew Shue, but not
this actor giving this performance.

This sort of cliché, though ubiquitous, is minor. More
seriously, the editing of the film dangerously encroaches on the
natural ­ or what seems natural ­ inciting and subsiding
of emotion. Jake has just beaten Beth a couple minutes ago in
screen time, she is still indignant, but her welts have mostly
healed. Jake turns on the charm, and it is charming, but it is too
soon to be succumbed to. We are not ready to forgive the bastard,
though at the same time we do feel, given time and in spite of our
better judgment, we just might. With time! Warriors truncates too
much, cuts from the summit of pathos to a parking lot ­ not
ironically, inarticulately.

Stuart Dryburgh (whose work on The Piano had the bad fortune of
coming up against Schindler’s List at Oscar time) has again framed
many timeless shots ­ Nig in the Cadillac with his gangmates,
for instance. Director Lee Tamahori, just gives him so much
platitudinous grist to work with. All told, Warriors’ callow
conveniences demote it from classic to merely a flawed
masterpiece.