A grim story about the
everyday humiliations of getting old, cowriter-director Stephen Verona’s Boardwalk leavens its darker aspects by
celebrating the love that keeps two people connected after 50 years of
marriage. Very much a showcase for the celebrated acting teacher Lee Strasberg,
who enjoyed a burst of fame following his memorable appearance in The Godfather: Part II (1974), Boardwalk offers a peculiar mixture of
caricature and understatement. The film’s broadest element is its depiction of
a street gang as a group of one-dimensional maniacs wreaking pointless havoc on
a once-peaceful neighborhood surrounding the Coney Island boardwalk. Nearly
every other aspect of the picture is executed with soft-spoken intimacy, so the
tension between the gang scenes and the rest of the film can be jarring at
times. Yet to Verona’s credit, he integrates the gang element early and keeps
it humming throughout the storyline until it becomes crucial to the climax, so
one never gets the sense that the narrative has spun out of control. Somewhat
like the messy lives it depicts, the narrative of Boardwalk goes where it goes, even if the trajectory sometimes
seems capricious and cruel.
David Rosen (Strasberg) operates a cafeteria near
the boardwalk, and his middle-aged kids, three sons and a daughter, all work
there. David’s wife, Becky (Ruth Gordon), teaches piano lessons out of the home
they’ve shared for half a century. But Coney is changing, mostly for the worse.
Muggings and robberies are commonplace, graffiti is everywhere, and seniors are
moving out in droves because they don’t feel safe anymore. David stubbornly
resists the temptation to flee, partially because he remembers leaving his
European homeland as a young man and doesn’t want to get pushed off his turf a
second time. His resolve is tested as criminal activity edges closer and closer
to his front door, and another complication arises when Becky develops health
problems.
At its core, Boardwalk is
about one man looking for dignity in a world that seems determined to strip him
of everything he loves, so there’s a powerful individual-vs.-society statement
in here somewhere. Other threads, which add tonal variety but not much weight,
involve the romantic travails of David’s daughter, Florence (Janet Leigh), and
the career woes of her adult son, an up-and-coming musician named Peter
(Michael Ayr). Like the gang scenes, these subplots are awkward, but they
eventually yield important moments.
It’s evident that Verona knows his locations well, so whether he’s going wide to
use street art as a painterly backdrop or going close to focus on the well-loved
tchotchkes inside Jewish homes, he employs the camera artfully. Verona also does a
fine job balancing different types of performance energy, juxtaposing, for
instance, Strasberg’s quiet resilience with Gordon’s singular mixture of
fragility and raunchiness. Withholding background music from many scenes
represents another strong creative choice, pulling viewers into the worlds of
the movie’s characters. So while Boardwalk
is far from masterful, it’s idiosyncratic and impassioned, all the way through
to the startling final scene.
Boardwalk:
GROOVY
