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Richard Linklater loves to watch men talk. And drink and smoke and pick up chicks and do all those other things guys like to do. Early on in The Newton Boys, his latest male-bonding flick, when the four adult brothers referred to in the title get reacquainted by piling on each other and mock-wrestling, I wondered how long it would be before one of them peed outside, experiencing manhood at its best (I'm assuming here, of course). Not long, it turned out. Linklater's previous films, Slackers, Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise, were all character-driven. They do have female parts, but the talk and the action orbit around the boys. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this, and in some cases--notably Sunrise--Linklater's painstaking probing has fresh results. The problem comes from making a character-driven film when there's not much to say. The impetus for The Newton Boys was an article written by Claude Stanush (later expanded into a book on which the screenplay in based), who has extensively interviewed Joe and Willis Newton as old men. Their colorful tales of professional and blood-free bank robbing apparently weren't enough for a movie. Linklater seems torn between retelling the story of the successful bank-robbing brothers as an action-packed Western or a Waltons-esque tale of familial struggle and devotion. An effectively old-fashioned title sequence leads into a warmly lit scene of Joe (Skeet Ulrich) and Jess (Ethan Hawke) Newton happily breaking a horse as their newly paroled older brother Willis (Matthew McConaughey) ambles up the road. Much back-slapping ensues. In these early scenes, Linklater sets up the morality of the film with snippets of exculpatory information: Willis was wrongly imprisoned, his record means he can't get a proper wife, the family has a hard and honest life with nothing to show for it. In most gangster films, the director spends little time defending the actions of the good bad guys. Here, though, Linklater takes giant steps to not only justify what the Newton Boys eventually do, but to demonstrate that a life of crime was their best option. Joe personifies this strange moralizing. After Willis leaves the family farm and finds early success as a bank robber--paired with explosives expert Brentwood Glasscock (what a name!)--he realizes that to be successful he needs more cohorts he can trust (a Linklater lesson: You can only really trust your family). He sends for horse-wrangling Joe and Jess. Hawke's Jess is the party boy of the family and is immediately swayed by the girls, booze and money Willis offers. Ulrich, as the more complex Joe, wants to support his brothers but thinks it's wrong to rob banks. Willis explains (and explains and explains) that banks have been ripping off poor farmers like them for years, and now they're insured anyway, so it's really just stealing from thieves. Proving his point, Linklater includes scene after scene of crooked bankers, insurance company men and police who casually break the law for their own profit. Joe continues to act as the lone moral voice, particularly when a big heist of a Canadian bank goes wrong in oddly humorous, slapstick fashion, with the brothers kicking away cops from their heels and tossing do-gooders off their backs. In general, their crimes come off with dull precision: They never kill anyone, they're never chased, they never get hurt. Eventually Willis decides that what they're doing has been wrong, but only because he's endangering his brothers. They retire from crime, and Willis returns to his oil well and weirdly modern relationship with working single mom Louise Brown (the luminous Julianna Margulies). But the big boys have screwed the Newton Boys again. It turns out that John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Co., among others, has better equipment than the Newtons and can pump deeper and faster. So after talking and arguing and cajoling, the brothers agree to make one last score. After all is said and done (more said than done), the happy ending is the only real twist in the film. As is so unfortunately typical of guys, it feels like a whole lot of build-up to a weak climax. The action scenes aren't exciting enough to suffice, and after all that talking, you're expecting something a little more dramatic than: They live! Alongside the final credits, Linklater runs excerpts from interviews with Willis and an appearance Joe made on the Tonight Show. These highlight his missed opportunity. By trying to make this a film about character and brotherhood and just how really cool guys are before simply telling an incredible story, Linklater puts the boys before the men. |
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