Brilliant

Rating: Null/10 (28 May 2002)

If you haven't seen this film, go out and rent it right now. Just sit back, relax, have a beer, and watch a terrific movie. It has drama, humor, great acting, a great story, and an ending that hits you right in the gut.
A few weeks from now, maybe a few months, see it again. There is so much of what I like to call "meat" in this film. It's a true story, and a compelling one, but look beneath the immediate to see what this film tells us about the culture of New York City, of America, in the early 1970s. American society was sick and rotting from the inside. Watergate was festering, but had yet to explode into the orgy of political pus which destroyed the Nixon presidency. Vietnam was still being fought in the jungles of Asia and on the streets of America. Generations were clashing, and American culture and society was divided against itself.
None of this context is directly provided by the film, but it is all relevant. Look at the attitude of the mob to the whole situation. That mob is the most fascinating character of the picture. First, they totally support Sonny. They make him a celebrity. He's the classic noble outlaw. Robbing the bank, sticking it to the man, and making the police look at the same time inept, ridiculous, and utterly corrupt. But when a shot is fired, the crowd realizes, for the first time, that their celebrity misfit criminal could be dangerous, and things begin to change. Mulvaney, the bank manager sees it. "That was a foolish thing you did, back there." When it is revealed, shockingly, that Sonny is a homosexual, the mob divides against itself. A small, vocal core of homosexuals begin supporting him, while the rest of the mob, the "mainstream" of American society, turn viciously against him. By the time he is escorted to the airport when the siege is over, the crowd has turned wholly against him, and the cops protect him from the public, rather than the other way around.
The mob is America. Sonny is crime. Not just any crime, but crime born of desperation. Sonny is an outcast from society. He has worked all his life (so we are told), but has never been able to provide adequately for his family. He talks frequently about the pressures he is under (and the pressures he faces on screen mirror the pressures that drove him into his predicament in the first place). He is trapped by a hopeless, helpless urban nightmare, and he's being drowned by the expectations of wife, lover, children, parents, and society itself. He is a Vietnam veteran, and still there is nowhere he can turn for help.
So, he robs a bank and takes hostages. Suddenly, everyone cares about him. The Establishment, suddenly, becomes terribly interested in Sonny's problems. Oh, they despise him, to be sure, and they want him dead. Sonny knows that. But suddenly, he is being listened to. Imagine what might have been if someone out there had been interested in Sonny's problems *before* he robbed the bank.
Imagine that.