Movie : Handsome Harry
Release Date: April 16, 2010 (limited)
Studio: Paladin
Director: Bette Gordon
Screenwriter: Nicholas T. Proferes
Starring: Jamey Sheridan, Steve Buscemi, Mariann Mayberry, Aidan Quinn, John Savage, Campbell Scott, Titus Welliver, Karen Young
Genre: Mystery
Summary: “Handsome Harry” is the latest film by Bette Gordon, whose 1983 feature, “Variety,” remains a signal work of the early American “indie” movement. Heading an impressive ensemble cast, Jamey Sheridan (“The Ice Storm,” “Syriana”) portrays the title role – a divorced man, alienated from his grown son, whose life is defined by a number of casual relationships but no intimate ones. A loner by choice, Harry is forced out of self-imposed exile when he is summoned to the deathbed of Tom Kelly (Steve Buscemi), an old Navy pal with one last wish: he wants Harry to seek out another old friend, Dave Kagan (Campbell Scott), and ask his forgiveness for some horrible wrong that Tom, Harry, and their other close friends committed when they were all still in the military. These men were once like Harry’s family, and Kagan was much more than that, but Harry has avoided them most of his adult life. Traveling thousands of miles–and across three decades of suppressed memories and emotions–Harry must now face each of his old buddies, and must ultimately find the courage to face Dave Kagan. Until he does, he will never be able to face himself.
Though it takes the form of a classic road movie, the true terrain covered by “Handsome Harry” is the male psyche. In a series of carefully observed, beautifully acted vignettes, the film explores what brought these men together, what drove them apart, how they betrayed one another and, worse still, how they betrayed themselves. Gordon, whose emotionally wrenching climax reveals the enormous gulf between who
Harry might have been and who he eventually became, proves that, sometimes, it takes a woman to show us what it takes to be a man.