Sean Burns
I was haunted by At Close Range long before I actually saw it. See kids, in ye olden days when MTV actually used to show music videos, the clip for Madonna’s “Live to Tell” was in semi-constant rotation. In it, the Material Girl has on an uncharacteristically dowdy dress and sits curled up in a wooden chair, wearing far less makeup than usual while singing her doomiest ballad directly into the lens.
Back then, music videos were a shrewd promotional tool not just for artists, but for upcoming movies as well. A hit song from a popular soundtrack could have audiences watching what basically amounts to a trailer for your film multiple times a day, and so the “Live to Tell” video cuts away—a lot –—to scenes from Madonna’s husband Sean Penn’s new movie, some sort of 1970s heartland crime drama in which the young man most people knew as Spicoli squares off with a pistol against a magnificently mustachioed Christopher Walken. It looked like something sinister and adult that eleven-year-old me shouldn’t be watching. Naturally, I was mesmerized.
I was fairly sure I had the whole story of At Close Range mapped out in my head thanks to that Madonna video. And a year or so later, when I finally saw the picture on cable, it played out pretty much exactly as I had imagined—almost like an extended version of the video, except this time with talking, especially since the movie’s score, by Madonna’s Virgin Tour musical director Patrick Leonard, is basically an instrumental version of “Live to Tell” for two hours. (He’d originally worked up the theme for a teen runaway movie called Fire with Fire, starring Craig Scheffer and Virginia Madsen, but Paramount Pictures rejected it in favor of a title track by a band called Wild Blue. Great call.)
The throbbing synth pulse of the soundtrack may seem a little incongruous with a gritty crime film set in 1978, but the music’s doom-laden grandeur is a perfect match for the excessive, enveloping stylization by director James Foley. Shot by Spanish cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchía, At Close Range is an almost absurdly beautiful picture—all rich, chiaroscuro shadows and supple shifts of light across young, wide-open faces. It’s a tale of innocence not just lost, but plunged into darkness. Based on a true story about a rural Pennsylvania crime boss who murdered one of his sons and tried to kill another, the movie doesn’t seem particularly interested in its own potboiler plotting. (Something about stolen tractors and the FBI.) Foley’s making a Greek tragedy, and he’s enlisted some acting gods.
It’s always a jolt to be reminded of just how electrifying Penn was back in the 1980s. In a movie landscape overrun with Brat Packers and Tiger Beat pretty boys, here was a sneering, chain-smoking menace who could move from the sublime comic heights of Fast Times at Ridgemont High to the sleazy, coked-out jitters of The Falcon and the Snowman. Rick Rosenthal’s 1983 juvie hall exploitation flick Bad Boys was a VHS sleepover staple for us young lads, always cheering along as Penn’s diminutive Mick O’Brien beat the towering Clancy Brown with a pillowcase full of soda cans. As Brad Whitewood Jr., a none-too-bright post-high school loser circling a future as a career criminal, At Close Range has him vibrating with potential violence throughout.
Like father, like son. (“Like hell,” the movie’s poster tagline added.) Walken’s Brad Sr. is one of the actor’s most devilishly charming roles, breezing back into town and whisking away his boys on a cloud of his contagious self-delight. He’s constantly doing that Walken thing where he’s all smiles until his eyes lock in and your blood runs cold. Plus, the man sure can wear a leather vest. A heartbreaking Chris Penn fills out the family trio as Brad Jr.’s even dumber baby brother. Was there ever an actor more defenseless? The younger Penn was so unguarded a screen presence sometimes I felt uncomfortable watching him. His squeaky voice always sounded like he hadn’t finished puberty yet, and this aching vulnerability seems to set something off in Walken’s character. The old man can’t help himself from being needlessly cruel to the boy. It’s just how Brad Sr. responds to weakness.
At Close Range soldiers forward with gloomy inevitability. The plot particulars are almost beside the point, and the screenplay feels like a few expository scenes are missing. But such details don’t really matter, as Foley is going for something grander and more elemental. Mary Stuart Masterson is the sweet, virginal soulmate who can save Brad Jr.’s soul, but she’s really more of an idea than a person. It’s a role carried off entirely by the actress’ natural radiance. (Somewhat troublingly, after Bad Boys this is the second film in three years during which the third act is motivated by Sean Penn’s girlfriend getting raped while he’s in jail.) Men fare better than the women in the picture, with Candy Clark and the Penn boys’ mom Eileen Ryan wasted in comparison to the juicy scenes for Crispin Glover, David Strathairn and the great Tracy Walter. And yes, that’s Kiefer Sutherland glowering on the sidelines.
It all builds to the shattering showdown featured so prominently in that Madonna video, with a bloody but not bowed Penn coming at Walken with “the family gun.” The latter told a funny story once on Inside the Actor’s Studio, claiming his younger co-star had tricked him during shooting into thinking he’d replaced their prop gun with the real deal. It’s probably not such an amusing anecdote after what happened on the set of Rust, but that “Wow!” that Walken yells when Penn gets up close is more than Method acting. He was genuinely scared shitless.
“At Close Range” is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
