A BRONX TALE
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1993 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Calogero is growing up in the Bronx in the late 50s with two father figures. One is his honest, hard-working, biological father and the other is a likable hood who takes Calogero under his wing. Robert DeNiro directs the film as well as playing the honest father while the screenwriter of the semi-autobiographical story turns in a winning performance as the hood. Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4).
When I think of Robert DeNiro these days, I mostly think about an interview he gave about GUILTY BY SUSPICION. His comments about the blacklisting era were so shallow and so lacking in information and insight that at the time I assumed he was a person with few talents other than line-reading. Now I have to reassess that conclusion after seeing his directorial debut.
Romantic love triangles are a staple of the film industry. For Robert DeNiro's directorial debut he has chosen a story with a different sort of love triangle, one of paternal love. Calogero has two father figures in his life. His true father (played by DeNiro) is a poor bus driver. That does not get a lot of respect in the Bronx Italian community in the late Fifties. What does get respect is being a hood like the local neighborhood boss Sonny (Chazz Palminteri). One day Sonny kills a man and nine-year-old Calogero lies to save his idol Sonny from the police. From that point on Sonny adopts Colgero, after a fashion. Both he and Lorenzo, Colgero's real father, want what is best for the boy, but Lorenzo is a straight arrow and wants his son to have nothing to do with the hood. In spite of his own profession, Sonny wants to keep Colgero honest and put him on the path to success.
Francis Capra is a little too sharp playing the nine-year-old Calogero. He is just a bit overly clever in his repartee with his parents. But then screenwriter Palminteri is actually writing about himself so might be a little willing to exaggerate his own verbal prowess when he was Calogero's age. And Calogero does have to be a little devious in how he balances his two father figures. The second part of the story has Calogero (now played by Lillo Brancato) seventeen years old and romantically interested in an attractive Black girl (Taral Hicks). The story comes to involve tensions between the Black and Italian communities in the Bronx. Now to Calogero, Sonny seems to be the only sane and tolerant person in the Italian community.
The story of A BRONX TALE is based on the Palminteri's semi- autobiographical play which he used to perform as a one-person show. The details of life in the Bronx and the style of storytelling are reminiscent of GOODFELLAS and DeNiro even has a cameo for Joe Pesci. Just as earlier this year Mel Gibson proved he had a better hand at directing than most of us would have expected, so too DeNiro's style is surprisingly good for a first-timer. He has a very sure hand at combining music into the action. His direction shows this in one of the first scenes of the film in which a montage of scenes from a stickball game are synchronized to a do-wop song.
But the real show-stealer is Palminteri himself as Sonny. The same stage presence that worked for him doing the story in his one-man show translates to charisma on the screen. Like Joe Mantegna in HOUSE OF GAMES, Palminteri is the central attraction whenever he is on the screen. As the hood, Sonny is magnetic while the audience expectation is that he will at some point do something nasty and his relationship with the boy will break down. That may or may not happen, but the character is real enough to transcend stereotypes and the story of the relationship probably more interesting and credible than most fiction writers would have made it. DeNiro proves himself as an accomplished director his first time around. My rating is a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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