Once in the Life Review
by "Harvey S. Karten" (film_critic AT compuserve DOT com)October 20th, 2000
ONCE IN THE LIFE
Reviewed by Harvey Karten
Lions Gate/TSG
Director: Laurence Fishburne
Writer: Laurence Fishburne
Cast: Paul Calderon, Michael Paul Chan, Dominic Chianese Jr., Sue Costello, Laurence Fishburne, Alan Francis, Gregory Hines, Annabella Sciorra, Eamonn Walker, Titus Welliver
"Once in the Life" is one of the more awkward titles for a movie this year. Too bad Laurence Fishburne, who wrote and directed this imaginative but claustrophobic film, could not have gone with the name he gave to his play, "Riff Raff," which is certainly more apropos to its content. Fishburne, a charismatic actor with expressive features and broad shoulders, is known principally as a performer, but this drama which he penned was produced at the acclaimed Circle Repertory Theatre in New York some time before the demise of that hallowed but financially pinched West Village institution. The trouble with the filmed version is that while some plays translate just fine to the screen--usually when they're opened up and when their action does not rely so much on dialogue as on movement and broad panoramas-- they work just fine. But "Once in the Life," despite a couple of dynamite monologues by its bleak and throughly sorrowful characters, never loses its identity as a work meant strictly for the stage. The movie is loaded with speechifying, and when one of its characters in flashback launches into what seems like reams of poetry, you're no longer watching a movie but listening to a staged reading.
The story centers on the themes of estranged brothers and fluid loyalties, all the action taking place on Halloween night. Mike (Laurence Fishburne), a black man otherwise known as 20/20 for his perceptive vision and mind that seems literally to click when he has an epiphany, has just teamed up with his white half-brother brother, Billy (Titus Welliver), a hardened heroin addict prone to picking fights with anyone who greets him in an insulting manner. Pulling off a drug heist which goes sour (a drug lord's henchman is killed), Mike pulls Billy into an abandoned Lower East Side crack den where Mike asks a former cellmate, Tony the Tiger (Eamonn Walker) to help him and his brother out of their jam. Unknown to Mike, Tony is part of the drug lord's gang and is torn between his loyalty to his old jailhouse pal and his duties to his employer. Most of the film's tension comes from the dialogue among Mike, Tony and Billy--with Billy increasingly weakening from a serious bullet wound in his hand and pangs of withdrawal from his drug habit.
While director Fishburne increasingly cuts to the side characters, members of the drug gang who take turns beating a fall guy and taking bets on whether Tony will follow the command to kill Mike, the principal tension comes from our guessing the outcome of the elongated discussion which recalls the good times that Mike and Tony shared during their incarceration. The most momentous monologue is a cynical poem by Tony the touches upon the ways that these characters have been deluding themselves: after all, once in the life of a drug pusher, always in the life of a pusher. Like no small number of plots in previous stories, the criminals and addicts who describe themselves for the audience deceive themselves by thinking that after just one more big heist, life will be an easy retirement.
Titus Welliver is particularly compelling as an altogether sad excuse for a human being; nose running, hand bleeding, whining in agony as his injured wrist is twisted by the sadistic Tony whom he hates and distrusts. Fishburne also turns in a solid performance as a man who at first is confident and seductive but becomes a simpering coward when confronted by a person he had every right to mistrust. Good performances and strong monologues aside, the film often looks like an actor's exercise that has not been effectively translated to the big screen.
Rated R. Running time: 110 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, [email protected]
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