James Foley’s second feature, the neo-noir melodrama At Close Range, does not show much improvement over his debut, Reckless, in 1984.
At Close Range | |
---|---|
![]() Theatrical release poster
|
|
In both pictures, rich visual imagery is overstated to the point of suffocating the meager story and diminishing its significance due to his style helming.
At Close Range, a blatant Oedipal text, begins as a tale about alienated youth, but quickly devolves into an intergenerational melodrama of a youngster corrupted by his own father, with both living in valueless world.
Nicholas Kazan’s screenplay is lean, but Foley treats the story of Brad Jr.’s (Sean Penn) fall from grace with excessive visuals and aural ripeness. Everything is lavish and overly stylized: night shots are perfectly lighted; figures are silhouetted against blue light.
A teenager with no prospects–no job and not interested in finding one, Brad is enticed into crime by a father (Osar winner Christopher Walken) who had earlier abandoned him as a boy and became a rather successful thief.
Brad steals tractors and commits crime not out of rebelliousness, but out of a deep emotional need to connect with his father. In this character study of the universal longing of sons for their fathers, the father-son relationship is both simple and allegorical. Brad’s romance with a farm girl (Mary Stewart Masterson) compensates for dreary family interactions with his mother (Millie Perkins) and younger brother (Chris Penn).
The contradictions in Brad’s character could have made him a loser, a defeatist, but Foley stresses the tenacity of his moral convictions that help him survive a corrupt world. That his triumph is as much moral as it is physical, is evident in a preposterous ending in which Brad is riddled with bullets but miraculously survives.
Inspired by a 1978 “Philadelphia Inquirer” account of a family involved in murder that pitted father against son, was a potentially interesting story that had to wait seven years until Foley found financial backing.
Hemdale finally agreed to underwrite the $6.5 million budget, provided that its stars, Sean Penn and Christopher Walken, worked for deferments.
Unfortunately, despite the good acting, the narrative is an inarticulate mess, even if in moments, Foley succeeds in achieving a compellingly noir mood of rural alienation and aimless existence.
Greeted with negative reviews, the movie was a commercial flop.
Credits:
Directed by James Foley
Screenplay by Nicholas Kazan; Story by Elliott Lewitt, Kazan
Produced by Don Guest, Elliott Lewitt
Cinematography Juan Ruiz Anchía
Edited by Howard E. Smith
Music by Patrick Leonard
Production companies: Hemdale Film Corporation; Cinema ’85
Distributed by Orion Pictures
Release date: April 18, 1986
Running time: 115 minutes
Budget $7.0 million
Box office $2.3 million