Reflecting on Larry Clark’s Kids and Edward Burns’ The Brothers McMullen I keep thinking of author/director Jean Luc Godard’s statement that every camera angle involves a moral judgement. It is the weakness of moral vision at the center of these two interesting films that accounts for their serious cinematic faults.
Written by the then 19-year-old Harmony Korine, Kids is a frightening, ugly, discouraging, and undoubtedly tendentious look at one day in the lives of several teenagers roaming the streets of Yorkville and Greenwich Village in New York City. The film, ninety minutes of sex, violence, drugs, and scabrous language, presents the teenage world not only without God, but without any discernible values. Director Larry Clark, a photographer making his first film, employs a cinema verité approach that makes obvious his debt to author/director John Cassavetes.
For a time Clark’s disjointed camera seems perfect to capture the unstructured, amoral world of city youth. Eventually, however, the method fails. Clark leaves us wanting some type of moral statement about what we are seeing. What was marvelous about the occasionally exasperating films of Cassavetes, (Faces, 1968; Husbands, 1970; Minnie and Moscowitz, 1972; A Woman Under the Influence, 1974) was that Cassavetes’ camera was able to capture some of the mystery of human nature. Clark’s doesn’t.
Years ago, philosopher Jacques Maritain suggested that the successful artistic depiction of evil depended on the altitude from which the artist viewed evil. In interviews Clark has indicated his attraction to the world of teenagers. That may be the problem: there is no distance between artist and subject. Kids depicts the chaotic world of teenagers, but the film doesn’t say anything about that world. One of the teenagers, Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), unknowingly AIDS-infected, is obsessed with having sex with virgins, which he does both at the beginning and the end of the film. Kids strains credulity: how many adolescents are really engaging in group sex or are this pathologically violent? Most surprising to me about this film has been the enthusiasm it has engendered among some critics whom I greatly respect. They were taken in, but why?
Author/director Edward Burns is more successful with his debut film, a humorous low budget exploration of the lives of three Irish American Catholic brothers hesitant to make permanent commitments to women. Filmed largely in and around Burns’ parental home in Valley Stream, The Brothers McMullen is an amusing, touching film by a very promising talent. In interviews, Burns has indicated his indebtedness to Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters(1986) and comparisons between Hannah and Brothers are easily made. The latter film even duplicates a scene from the former.
The oldest McMullen brother, Jack (Jack Mulcahy), a high school coach happily married to a nearly perfect wife, nevertheless has an affair with a teacher; the youngest brother, Patrick (Mike McGlone), most preoccupied with Catholicism, has sex regularly with his girlfriend but wonders about going to hell; the middle brother, Barry (Edward Burns), has given up on Catholicism but is terribly frightened by the prospect of a lifetime of commitment. Though none of the brothers has personally appropriated Catholicism into his life, their reactions to the faith they have inherited are always of interest. All three actors turn in admirable performances.
Even an amateur psychologist might guess that the brothers’ problems stretch back to their parents. The Brothers McMullen opens with the boys’ mother at the grave of her foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, abusive husband, announcing that she is returning to Ireland to marry her true love who has been waiting for her for 35 years. With actor Burns as Barry, staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed as his mother vigorously walks past the graves heading for delayed marital bliss in Ireland, author/director Burns exhibits the humor in the face of serious matters he carries throughout the film.
Burns has set out on a project with Brothers: to do for American Irish Catholics what Woody Allen and Spike Lee have done for their respective communities. Whether Burns is in their league remains to be seen. On the evidence of his first film, Burns’ vision of Catholic life cuts only so deep.
Clark plans to make two more films in a similar vein to Kids eventually forming a teenage trilogy. Burns has already been rewarded with a three million dollar deal to make another film about Irish Americans. I think little can be expected from Clark beyond the prurient. If Burns can reflect more deeply about his religious background, however, something cinematically richer may be the result.