HURRICANE STREETS
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. United Artists Director: Morgan J. Freeman Writer: Morgan J. Freeman Cast: Brendan Sexton III, Shawn Elliot, Jose Zuniga, David Roland Frank, Carlo Alban, Antoine McLean, Mtume Gant, Lynn Cohen, Edie Falco, Heather Matarazzo, Damian Corrente, David Moscow, L.M. Kit Caron, Isidra Vega
"Hurricane Streets" is much closer in genre to Truffaut's "400 Blows" than it is to the Hughes Brothers' "Dead Presidents." Written and directed by Morgan J. Freeman-- who has moved Truffaut's Parisian ambiance to New York's Lower East Side--the picture deals with a group of high-school kids who are dabbling in petty crime, presumably hurt by the absence of parental authority. They're at the crossroads that can take them more deeply into a life of misconduct or can see them straighten out: In fact we can predict that the fellows who make the big move to armed robbery are the ones who are being manipulated by older, more hardened criminals who appear to be mentoring them into the big stuff.
This picture, which played at the 1997 Sundance Festival, claims to be the first dramatic entry every to win a triple prize: the Audience Award, the prize for inaugural Dramatic Directing, and the honor for Cinematography. For a while you wonder why. But director Freeman carefully adds texture to his tale of youthful anomie and, with a sound track that builds up and underscores the wonderful disco beat of "Being Alive," "Hurricane Streets" has enough suspense and complexity to appeal to its targeted youthful audience and to cross over to an adult constituency as well.
Opening with a black-and-white scene which foreshadows a climactic point in the drama, "Hurricane Streets" focuses on the 15-year-old Marcus (Brendan Sexton, Jr.), a kid whose budding career as a petty thief belies his open-faced vulnerability and general naivete. The de facto leader of a racially- and ethnically-mixed group of young people who hang out in an underground club house, Marcus has troubles which can be traced to an absentee mother who is serving a prison sentence for killing his abusive father. Living with his grandmother, who owns a neighborhood bar, Marcus awaits an air ticket from his uncle in New Mexico, a sunny state which the young man treats as a Shangri-La where he has space to breathe and where he can get away from the mean streets of his New York ghetto. The romantic interest is almost laughingly innocent when you consider the pregnancy rate of young women living in poor neighborhood: when Marcus meets fourteen-year-old Melena (Isidra Vega), he begins to hang out with her and while they meet daily, they content themselves with a couple of chaste kisses.
Moreover with one exception the guys who chill out in the clubhouse to play darts, one-up each other with remarkably guileless braggadocio, and plan an incremental increase in their blooming careers in crime, are flat-out cute. Marcus, Benny, Harold and the others are more like the Bowery Boys than Anthony Curtis and his band from "Dead Presidents." They seem even unfamiliar with popular slang: when one of the boys suggests stealing a car, he estimates that they could fence it for "1,000 big ones." (Since when is a buck a big one?)
The coy courtship of Marcus and Melena is tender and believable, courtesy of sharp acting from Sexton--who gained national recognition from his role in the remarkable "Welcome to the Dollhouse"--and a film debut from 18-year-old Isidra Vega. Cinematographer Enrique Chediak shines particularly in his lensing of Marcus riding his bike feverishly through the streets of New York and, all in all, "Hurricane Streets" profiles for us a group of teens who are not cookie-cutter gang members. Rather, they are individuals with a fair degree of guilt feelings for the lives they are leading and who can be helped to follow the straight and narrow if they can only be sequestered from the more hardened adults who are tutoring them. Rated R. Running time: 88 minutes. (C) Harvey Karten 1998
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