Whether or not these enterprising guys and their "offbeat" productions merely retread worn-out themes, assignment editors and art-house patrons never tire of hearing about filmmakers scraping up budgets that couldn't have paid for an Evian break on Titanic. By the time their films are released, they come equipped with halos and viewers can get blinded by the light. In 1997, some of the best and most ambitious studio work, such as Steven Spielberg's Amistad and Jim Sheridan's The Boxer, couldn't score the critical kudos and admiring coverage awaiting Peter Cattaneo and The Full Monty. That affable, negligible movie rode waves of festival acclaim at places as different as Edinburgh and Turin all the way to the Oscars.
In recent years, probably no indie tyro has had a bigger, longer lucky streak than that triple-threat Burns. His break came in 1995, when he won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for his first movie, The Brothers McMullen. Watching this amateurish debut on opening night of the 1995 San Francisco Film Festival, I was astonished that it made any other festival's cut; when it went on to achieve a $10 million art-house success, I was floored. To me, Burns's sketch of Long Island Irish Catholic men with women trouble hardly registered as a movie. It played like a workshop production on a threadbare regional stage, and it was stultifyingly banal. Still, Burns was hailed for dialogue that at best could have fit into a high-toned sitcom: "Hey, I like being a pessimist -- it makes it easier to deal with my inevitable failure." He followed McMullen in 1996 with She's the One, a variation on many of the same theatrical cliches: a good-looking poetic soul who's skittish about commitment (played in both pictures by Burns himself); a confused, straying husband; and the brotherly competition that sometimes goes into finding Ms. McRight.
Burns's backstage success story, about making McMullen while moonlighting from a job on Entertainment Tonight, was cheery and uplifting and all that. But the boost he got from his real-life rags-to-glad-rags tale trailed off with the release of She's the One and may vanish entirely with his new No Looking Back. About the only booster left to predict that it will prove him to be "more than a flash in the Sundance pan" is an anonymous capsule movie-reviewer in Premiere.
No Looking Back has been touted as a stretch for Burns because it isn't romantic or comic, and because it is his first woman-centered film. Lauren Holly takes on the part that usually goes to Burns -- the dissatisfied dreamer. Burns, instead, plays a handsome heel who hurt her once but wants her back. This is less a stretch than a contraction: the dregs of Burnsiana, done in drag.
At the start, Holly's character, Claudia, a thirtysomething waitress in her seaside working-class hometown (the movie was shot in Rockaway Beach, New York), is on the marriage track with a steady fellow named Michael (Jon Bon Jovi). Then Burns, playing a feckless grease monkey named Charlie, returns from a stint in California and rouses her slumbering dreams of true love or rebellion or escape. Burns conceives Charlie as a sleazy small-town charmer who's as much of a potential millstone as the limited Michael; he'll do anything to manipulate Claudia back into his bed. We're meant to root for Claudia to see through both guys and stand on her own two feet. She is woman, hear her roar.
But Claudia is too vague and slippery to carry the weight of feminist heroism. Like a prefeminist stereotype, she's a totally reactive personality; she defines herself only in opposition, whether to possessive men, conventional friends, a smart-mouthed, love-starved, stay-at-home sister (Connie Britton) or a long-suffering mother (Blythe Danner) who learns to accept that her husband has walked out for good. Of course, we're supposed to recognize that Claudia is most like her wandering dad. Unfortunately, Burns fails to devise scenes that would depict Claudia as a born rambler rather than a victim or a malcontent. She is woman, hear her whine. (And I do mean whine: Both Holly and Burns have slender, monotonous voices. You begin to hunger for the heartier tones of Bon Jovi or the throatier ones of Danner.) And setting up an off-screen father as the psychological key to Claudia is the dramatic equivalent of building a legal case on hearsay evidence.
In the introduction to his collected screenplays (Hyperion, 1997), Burns says that his first goal as a filmmaker was to "take a look at what it was like to grow up Irish Catholic in America." If No Looking Back is any indication, when the people he knows get into their thirties, they shed many of their Irish Catholic attributes, especially their anxieties over sex and damnation. What Burns wallows in here is a simultaneously nostalgic and condescending vision of a rundown East Coast prole town. On the positive side, the presence of Springsteen songs like "I'm on Fire" on the soundtrack suggests an elemental vitality to the close-knit, rather desperate community, where men scrape by on low-paying jobs and women keep their eyes peeled for the slightest shift in the courting scene.
But in Claudia's view, the whole town is one big dead end. The clearest statement of what Claudia wants, or at least what she doesn't, comes when she tells Michael she'd rather go to "a nice restaurant" in the city than to his mother's house for a big meal: "Because we haven't left this town to do anything in over a year. It would be nice to see something other than the same people and the same streets. Besides, every time we go over to your mother's, you and your brothers sit in the living room and watch football, and your mother and sister trap me in the kitchen and ask when we are going to get married."
There's no dishonor in being a good waitress, but Claudia feels that it would be a living death to grow old as one. And there's no indication she could do anything else. Her distance from an older waitress made me yearn for the inspirational sisterhood-is-wonderful diner scenes in Scorsese's peppy Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Burns plays the class card, all right, but with an upwardly mobile strategy. And he deals it from the bottom of the deck.
No Looking Back.
Rated R.
Directed by Edward Burns. With Burns, Lauren Holly and Jon Bon Jovi.
