Word: gering
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...ghettos to become Somebodies. It's a formula that has already produced a pair of smash movies, Rocky and Saturday Night Fever, as well as new stars to go with them. Bloodbrothers is the latest entry in this sweepstakes, and it too has a fresh young actor, Richard Gere, in the lead. If lightning fails to strike a third time, it is not that the formula is tired; it's that Bloodbrothers is a mess...
...first film, his new work is a bleak and unstinting attack on America's materialistic culture. But Malick is an artist, not a polemicist; his scabrous ideas are expressed in the elegiac terms of a fable. In Days of Heaven he tells of a migrant worker, Bill (Richard Gere), who travels from Chicago with his lover Abby (Brooke Adams) and his kid sister Linda (Linda Manz) to harvest wheat for an aristocratic Texas farmer (Playwright Sam Shepard). Tired of "nosing around like a pig" and infuriated by his employer's wealth, Bill decides to use the ravishing Abby...
...these other native ironists, Malick keeps his distance from his material. Though built around a heartbreaking love triangle, Days of Heaven has no introspective dialogue and no Freudian fireworks. Accordingly, actors have been cast more on the basis of how they look than how they emote. Except for Gere, who is too manicured to pass for a migrant, the cast serves the movie well. In a more conventional film, perhaps, Gere might have caused severe damage; here he is just an irritant...
...Richard Kiley) and first lover (Alan Feinstein) are far less sympathetically drawn than they were in the novel. Theresa's one appealing suitor (William Atherton), whose sweetness should leaven the story, becomes as cruel as the rest. Only the Italian stud Tony, played with magnetic ferocity by Richard Gere, seems remotely human...
Regrettably, the director largely abandons the altruistic thread in the narrative as he increasingly dwells on Dunn's plunge into the hedonist ethic. The repeated humiliation accorded Theresa by her handsome sexual swordsman (Richard Gere) is designed to serve as a counterpoint to the unrequited love showered on her by the enraptured James Morrissey (William Atherton), but the novelty of the contrast quickly wears off as the subjugation of Theresa becomes progressively uglier. She throws herself into cocaine-sniffing, prostituting herself for the thrill of the act, and blowing off Morrissey out of sheer spite. The schoolteacher identity is tossed...