Word: mother
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Andrew Wyeth painted landscapes of this bucolic stretch of Pennsylvania, but could he ever have imagined these small, warped figures inhabiting them? Brad Whitewood Sr. (Christopher Walken) runs a scuzzy gang that makes millions breaking into company safes and hijacking tractors. His estranged wife and her mother slouch around their dreary house staring at TV. Brad Jr. (Sean Penn) is searching for something worth spending his teenage energy on: maybe his lay-about friends, maybe that cute 16-year-old he's just met (Mary Stuart Masterson), maybe the toxic dream of emulating...
...rope, and the option of lassoing their characters or hanging themselves. Within the strictures and excesses of Method acting, most of them do just fine. Christopher Penn (Sean's brother) is good as a slow wit with a long fuse; Eileen Ryan (Sean's and Christopher's mother) plays their grandma as a silent witness against familial treachery. Masterson has a face and a talent worth watching. Walken, flashing Faginese charm across his splendidly wasted face, is a monster any son could find walking into his nightmares...
...toes, talking seductively to the bathroom mirror, and dressing up in skimpy clothes and excessive make-up to go manhunting at the local shopping mall. Connie is like any other teenage girl in heat, only she seems much more vapid and much less interesting. When Connie argues with her mother (Mary Kay Place) and refuses to help with the dishes or paint the house, she is nothing less than despicable. Connie is a suburban rebel without a cause--she is boy-craziness and giggles, meanness and anger, but not much intelligence...
They also seem to have a keen awareness of my wardrobe, for it is only on that one day each month that filial duty causes me to wear my mother's latest silk and sequine Polo gift that one of them jumps up in my face and demands...
...physical attacks, the most popular of which is backing down and saying "It means a lot more to them than it does to us." I don't believe such people as far as they could throw me; I know it means a lot to me to hear my mother's honor abused by a pimply teenage Satanist with hair like a chicken...