WENT TO CONEY ISLAND ON A MISSION FROM GOD...BE BACK BY FIVE (director/writer: Richard Schenkman; screenwriter: Jon Cryer; cinematographer: Adam Beckman; editor: Richard LaBrie; cast: Jon Cryer (Daniel), Rick Stear (Stan), Rafael Baez (Richie), Ione Skye (Gabby), Frank Whaley (Skee-Ball Weasel), Peter Gerety (Maurice), Akili Prince (Julie), Patricia Mauceri (Mrs. Munoz), Christina Hernandez (Allegra), Dominic Chianese(Photographer), William Wise (The Store Owner); Runtime: 94; Phaedra Cinema; 2000)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
A sometimes engaging indie film about three best friends growing up in NYC, that is a heartfelt story but is hampered by its awkward dialogue and unfulfilling plot. It begins with the voiceover from a mature Danny (Cryer), telling how he met at an early age his two best childhood friends -- Stan (Stear) and Richie (Baez).
The crux of the film has them already graduated from high school and functioning as young adults, living a life that is less rosy than their childhood expectations. Stan, their outspoken leader, who was born with a bum foot, is living with his childhood sweetheart Gabby (Skye), and is unhappy in his current job as a pizza parlor worker, resulting in a drinking problem. Danny is the timid one who works as an appraiser for a jewelry store, a respectable job but the store operates much like a pawnbroker's, and he feels unsatisfied with his position but thinks he's lucky to have it. Richie, who fooled the boys early on by lying about his sexual prowess with women, has had a mental breakdown and disappeared somewhere in Coney Island, where his friends believe he is living as a homeless person.
When the two friends go in search of Richie, in the deserted winter landscape of Coney Island, we see in flashbacks all the disappointments in their lives that led to their current despair and what bonded them together and why this search becomes a spiritual odyssey for them.
They come across a few of the odd characters who inhabit the bleak offseason playland, such as a photographer in his seventies who has the boardwalk in his blood and can't leave the area, even though it has deteriorated from his youth and he has led a lonesome life there. A couple of men lovers who recreate a staged melodramatic lover's argument in front of the boys and talk in an unnatural stagelike voice. And an unethusiastic waitress, with a scowl, who serves them hotdogs without any relish. A young Skee-Ball operator who talks like a college lecturer about the rules in his place. All these characters seemed contrived and left the film feeling flat, though comedy burst forth from time to time. The best conversations are between Danny and Stan, and give the pic its intellectual stimulus and reason for being.
The story of Richie, takes the film down a different avenue, as it is wracked with pain. Richie has a chemical imbalance and chooses to be a homeless person, with sparks of memory coming back to him, but because of his sexual problems and guilt-trip over his sister's car accident, and because he refuses to take his medicine to treat his condition, he can't function as a normal person any longer. He is too depressed to make any sense of his life and the film doesn't know what to make of him, except as a tragic figure who was once considered to be like the other boys.
"Went to Coney Island" never got untracked, though it had some bright dramatic moments and some perceptive comic offerings, but it could never come together as a complete picture. It was also done in by a needless subplot of Stan getting into gambling debts and being beaten, which just seemed like padding to a thin story. Too much of the film seemed to have no place to go, just like misinformed tourists who go to Coney in the winter to see the idle Cyclone ride.
REVIEWED ON 2/23/2001 GRADE: C
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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