REVIEW

Being Flynn

— By rough count, Robert De Niro has been in 89 films, yet he’s likely never played a character quite like Jonathan Flynn, the drunken, self-aggrandizing father taken from Nick Flynn’s searing memoir Another Bull Night in Suck City. Flynn Sr. is surly, racist and a homophobe. He also has an unceasing belief in his own literary genius, which makes him more than a little tragic.

De Niro plays him straight, that is to say, he portrays the man warts and all without regard to his own status as a Cinematic American Icon. To the great dismay of his son, Nick (Paul Dano), Jonathan, who completely abandoned his wife (Julianne Moore) and young child and went to jail for a fraudulent check-cashing scheme many years ago, appears one night at the Boston homeless shelter in which Nick has found a job.

As the two men meet, Nick is settling down nicely into the life of an addict, drinking heavily, snorting lines and getting turned on to the crack pipe. Needless to say, his father’s presence (at one point hissing at his son: “You are me!” perhaps Nick’s worst nightmare) does little to assuage the various demons in Nick’s soul. So bitter and fearful is Nick, when his father is barred from the place for persistently belligerent behavior, he wants nothing to do with him, even as he’s turned out into the cold of a Boston winter.

Try as he might, though, he can’t escape his father’s reach, which is where the shrewd bit of storytelling writer/director Paul Weitz inserts into the narrative - the film plays a kind of narrative tug-of-war between its two protagonists, who both explain in voice over how the story should be told - works to its sharpest and most effective point.

As a counter to Jonathan’s self-delusion and constant aggrandizement, Nick is soft and scared and meek, unable to establish his own identity or find his way outside his father’s dirty clutches, until he finally takes pity on the old man and arrives at a certain kind of peace.

As for Jonathan, as he forcefully informs us, he doesn’t indulge in self-pity. As bad as things get for him, he never loses his ability to rewrite the story in his own head such that his literary genius is always at the forefront of his mind. “I’m a survivor!” he tells his son near the end, and in that moment, his character - frustrating, prejudiced and delusional as it is - proves worthy of our attention.

Being Flynn 87 Cast: Robert De Niro, Paul Dano, Julianne Moore Director: Paul Weitz Rating: R, for language throughout, some sexual content, drug use and nudity Running time: 102 minutes

MovieStyle, Pages 38 on 05/18/2012

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