Washington Heights

Washington Heights is geared toward the Latino community. A nice movie about a small community inside a giant New York city. Much like its audience, the movie itself was made by the efforts of Latinos. While the movie focuses on the main character and his interactions with his friends, enemies, parents, and girlfriend, the movie's strongest link is the side story of the Father. It is the relationship between the Father and the Son that keeps many audience members interested in what is going to happen next. Instead, the story jumps too much between the side stories of the friend who wants to go bowling, his girlfriend who is making dresses, and the neighborhood that jumps in and out of everybody's lives without warning. In the end, a nice story that hits home on many levels. The story about a father and a son who were never Father and Son is the strongest link in this movie's chain.

WASHINGTON HEIGHTS (2003) **1/2 Tomas Milian, Manny Perez, Danny Hoch, Jude Ciccolella, Andrea Navedo, Bobby Cannavale, David Zayas, Callie Thorne, Judy Reyes. Well-acted morality tale about a talented illustrator (Perez) with dreams of having his own comic book finds himself trapped in the titular neighborhood where he is forced to aid his recently stricken father (Milian) to run the family bodega. Conflicts and conscience run high with the feel of early Lumet or Lee thanks to newcomer Alfredo De Villa's use of digital video to give the film a feeling of intimacy and closeness that parallels the claustrophobia felt by the main characters. Familiar yet watchable.

I loved this film from the moment La Vida es un Carnival started till the end. It avoids so many of the cliches that other immigrant stories fall prey to, and instead gives us a real snapshot of the lives of a handful of characters in this New York neighborhood. I can't stand films where everything is so neatly wrapped up and by the end all of the characters' conflicts are resolved. Instead, this film let's us see a handful of very alive characters fight to pursue their dreams against the barriers of their families, history, loves, and, most importantly, themselves. By the conclusion, we don't know all the answers of where they'll be, but we know who they are, and we care about them immensely. Nat Moss and Alfredo de Villa deserve a huge round of applause for having written such a touching and compelling story.

The movie is also beautifully shot, with de Villa's hand adding to the text as all great directors do. In one fantastic scene, we see one of the characters joyfully announce his engagement, ask for help from his friend, and have his friend reveal that he cannot help due to a debt between their fathers. The character then responds in anger to the fact that his father would help his friend, but not his own son. As tightly as the scene is written, it is shot equally well, with the camera following the characters through the bodega, keeping up their increasing intensity. The shooting adds to the scene immensely. There is also a beautiful sequence that is set up over many very brief earlier moments where we see a real transformation in the main character's artistic direction (he is a cartoon artist). I was struck while watching it how hard it is to show in a film the growth of an artist, or even the creative process. Yet here de Villa does so brilliantly, making it completely believeable.

Finally, the acting in this film is fantastic. As the star Carlos of the film, Manny Perez wonderfully alternates, like his neighborhood, between the high energy of his ambition, the frustration (and ultimate satisfaction) of his family ties, and his ambivalence about where he belongs. Tomas Milian turns in an Oscar-worthy performance as the father/bodega owner. And numerous smaller roles reveal potential stars, including Danny Hoch, who is brilliant from start to finish, and Bobby Carnavale, who steals the screen nearly every moment he's on it.

In the last few decades, the neighborhood of Washington Heights in upper Manhattan has changed from the predominantly German Jewish area I grew up in to one that is now almost exclusively Dominican. The change took place gradually after thousands of small landowners in the Dominican Republic were dispossessed in 1965-1966 following the U.S. military invasion and occupation. When I think about the Heights of my youth, I can still smell the freshly baked rye bread from the Jewish bakeries on St. Nicholas Avenue and taste the kosher pickles from my father's delicatessen on 193rd street. Now, as captured by first-time director Alfredo de Villa in the film Washington Heights, the streets are filled with salsa music and bodegas and domino players in the streets. Shot on digital video in basements, streets, alleys, and ground floor apartments in only 18 days with a minimal budget, Washington Heights is about fathers and sons, the conflict of generations, and the sad undercurrent of violence that is a part of the assimilation process.

In the film, two sons are hampered in their attempts to realize their dreams. Carlos Ramirez (Manny Perez) commutes daily to the East Village to work as a comic book inker and longs to have his own imprint house. He is unwilling to forgive his father Eddie (Tomas Milian) for cheating on his mother. Eddie, who owns the corner bodega, had to give up his own goal to become a bolero singer when he married and had a son and now scorns his son's artistic ambitions. In a subplot, Carlos' friend Mickey, the son of an Irish building manager Sean Kilpatrick (Jude Ciccolella) dreams of winning a bowling tournament is Las Vegas but his father does everything he can to keep him stuck in his job as a building superintendent.

Tragically, Carlos' plans are put on hold after his father is shot and paralyzed during a robbery. It is a struggle for both men to accept the new conditions of their life and old resentments quickly boil to the surface but there are tender moments as well. When Carlos takes over the business, however, he discovers that his father owes a debt of $25,000 to Kilpatrick and is determined to work until he can pay off the debt. Carlos' preoccupation with running the business and taking care of his father puts strains on his relationship with his dressmaker girl friend Maggie (Andrea Navedo) and she says to Carlos: "You think you are an artist but you're just a guy whose father owns a bodega."

Things become even more complicated when his girl friend's brother, Angel (Bobby Cannavale) hides the money he is saving to return to the Dominican Republic in his LP collection and foolishly tells people where it is. Ultimately, Carlos is able to use his experience with his father to deepen his commitment to the neighborhood and to transform the quality of his art. I found Washington Heights to be predictable and sometimes amateurish, but it is an honest and involving film that portends a bright future for the director and his cast and one I would not hesitate to recommend.

In 1973, Martin Scorsese revolutionized contemporary urban drama in film with "Mean Streets". Every movie about crime or blue-collar neighborhoods made since then--from "Godfather, Part II" onward--has owed much of its visual sensibilities, dialogue, and plot to Scorsese's early masterpiece. And the unfortunate side effect is that too many filmmakers try to rip it off almost completely (ex: "Sugar Hill", "Monument Ave."). "Washington Heights" is the latest of such travesties, and one of the worst I have seen.

The film is about a Carlos (screenwriter & producer Manny Perez), an aspiring comic book artist living in the Washington Heights neighborhood in New York City, his disapproving immigrant storekeeper father Eddie(Tomas Milian), and his stupid best friend Mickey (Danny Hoch). When Eddie gets shot by a robber, Carlos has to take in the old man and run the store for him, much to the chagrin of them both. Plus Mickey thinks all his problems will be solved if he can just scrape together $5000 to get to a bowling tournament in Vegas, all his problems will be over. If you remember Robert De Niro's character in "Mean Streets", then you can guess how Mickey gets the money and what happens to him.

As for Carlos, it is very hard to sympathize with this guy. He is angry all the time and is forever acting superior to his father, his girlfriend, his friends and his customers. And I've seen the artist son vs. the practical dad once too often in movies to be particularly affected by it. That part of the film is done more artfully than Neil Diamond's version of "The Jazz Singer", but not by much. The only truly interesting, likable character with interesting things to say is Eddie, the father. But he's hardly in the film.

Aside from the cliched script, there are several technical aspects of the film I didn't like. First, it was shot with hand-held video cameras, which gives the movie a "Blair Witch" feel: the colors are washed out, the picture is never completely in focus, and the motion of the camera-man's walking make the frame bob up and down all the time. Also the audio was rotten, so the dialogue was difficult to hear (although that may have just been a deficiency of the theater I saw the movie in). And it has all the usual flaws that "Dogma 95" fans find so endearing, but the rest of us can't stand: over-long silences followed by over-long improvised dramatic monologues, 30-second shots of a character doing nothing interesting, and amateurish post-production.

"Mean Streets" still teaches young filmmakers how to make a splash with a film. Unfortunately, it does not teach that lightning rarely strikes twice in the same place, and that you can't make much of an impact with somebody else's ideas. "Washington Heights" tries very hard to be faithful to the first lesson and to ignore the second, but Manny Perez is no Harvey Keitel, Danny Hoch is no Robert De Niro, and Alfredo De Villa is certainly no Martin Scorsese. 5 out of 10.