Beyond the Multiplex

"A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints": If "Mean Streets" went to the big-hair years
Writer-director Dito Montiel's debut feature, "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," won a special award for its ensemble of actors at this year's Sundance festival, and it's easy to see why. Shia LaBeouf gives the performance of his young career as (ahem) Dito, a sensitive, damaged kid growing up on the beat-down streets of Astoria, an old-school Queens, N.Y., ethnic nay-buh-hood, in the mid-'80s. Chazz Palminteri and Dianne Wiest are terrific as Dito's parents, Melonie Diaz is charming as his girlfriend, and Channing Tatum all but steals the movie as Antonio, his violent, doomed best friend.

Yeah, they're all terrific, and when Montiel sticks to the colorful, funny and violent story of Dito's troubled youth in those years of big hair and yowling guitars, the movie's a winner too. Yes, it's one you've seen before, and not just once or twice. But if "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints" is wearing its Noo-Yawk-native roots on its sleeve -- mainly Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets," but also "Summer of Sam" and "Kids" and "The Basketball Diaries," among others -- its verve, passion and honesty are completely unfaked.

Unfortunately, Montiel is adapting his own memoir-cum-novel of the same title, so he wraps the engaging tale of Dito's adolescence in a dreary present-tense fable about adult Dito (played morosely by Robert Downey Jr., who was originally going to direct) returning to Astoria after a long absence to make peace with his dying father and lost friends. This slows down the picture and gums it up, making the already-evident nostalgia of the '80s plot seem increasingly sludgy and mawkish.

As if to make up for this entirely unnecessary level of narrative (complete with deadly voice-over narration), Montiel begins to add pseudo-artistic flourishes that are even less necessary: We see scenes more than once from various vantage points, shot from odd angles, with distorted visual effects added. I suspect this guy can make a good movie if he learns the right lessons; he's made about half of one here. But the praise heaped upon "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints" is way too much, way too soon.

"A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints" opens Sept. 29 in New York and Los Angeles, with a national rollout to follow.

"So Goes the Nation": What's the matter with Ohio?
Sorry, Ken Blackwell fans, but Adam Del Deo and James D. Stern's mole's-eye view of the 2004 presidential race in Ohio, "So Goes the Nation," is not about how the Republicans gamed the system and stole the White House. (You can certainly find that perspective elsewhere.) This is a conventional political documentary with a conventional view of what happened in the Buckeye State and why, but it's no less fascinating for all that.

Del Deo and Stern are scrupulously evenhanded as they follow a handful of Kerry-Edwards and Bush-Cheney volunteers (idealistic and devoted, on both sides) through the final stages of the "ground game" in Ohio. Even more fascinating for political junkies, they got the people in their film, and the major strategists from both parties, to reflect on winning and losing after all the chips had been cashed. So you get to hear former Clinton strategist Paul Begala decry the toothless incompetence of the Kerry campaign, when faced with the disciplined, on-message attack machine of the GOP. ("They had 15 ways to win and only one way to lose," Begala says of the Democrats. "And they picked the way to lose.")

Republican honchos Ed Gillespie, Ken Mehlman and Mark McKinnon discuss Karl Rove's central insight into 21st century American politics: The swing voter is dead, and the way to win now is to energize and motivate your base. By their own admission, the Bush-Cheney campaign got 3 million fewer votes from independents in 2004 than in 2000 -- but something like 11 million more Republican votes. (Rove himself, as is his wont, does not appear in the film.)

McKinnon observes that Kerry, a middle-ground liberal with a long record of legislative compromise and triangulation, made a perfect opponent for the incumbent's campaign, which sought to avoid concrete issues and send one message: Bush is strong and Kerry's weak. Bush is decisive and Kerry's flabby. In trying to reshape himself as a heartland he-man instead of a lifelong Northeast Corridor insider, Kerry constantly made minor gaffes and evasive statements that played into the Bushies' hands. (McKinnon thinks Howard Dean would have been more difficult to defeat, at least on the ground of forceful opinions.)

Both campaigns, as we observe them working door-to-door in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati, are impressive organizing efforts. Conspiracy theories aside, the real problem with Del Deo and Stern's film is that they, and almost everybody else, missed the big stories in Ohio. As we clearly see on Election Day, African-American voters turned out in huge numbers in urban neighborhoods, and had to stand in two- or three-hour lines to vote on a few overloaded machines. Turnout among rural and suburban white conservatives was also huge, but those people generally just showed up, cast their ballots and drove home; lines were rarely more than a few minutes in duration.

How much was the 2004 presidential race decided by this rudimentary inequality (for which, as the film points out, Democratic officials at the county level are at least partly responsible)? And will the Democratic Party ever be willing to gamble on energizing its base with a forceful candidate and an aggressive message, or is it now the permanent lukewarm coalition of 49 percent? "So Goes the Nation" has no answers to these questions, but in dispassionately presenting American politics, even at its sleaziest, as an honorable craft, it may offer hope to small-d democrats of all flavors.

"So Goes the Nation" opens Oct. 4 at the IFC Center in New York, with other cities to follow.

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