# Spring Forward (1999)

### reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten

    SPRING FORWARD

     Reviewed by Harvey Karten
     IFC Films
     Director: Tom Gilroy
     Writer:  Tom Gilroy
     Cast: Ned Beatty, Peri Gilpin, Ian Hart, Hallee Hirsh,
    Catherine Kellner, Bill Raymond, Liev Schreiber, Campbell
    Scott

Men are from Venus and women are from Mars...of is it the other way around? If you go by some of the wisdom of today's self-help books, you wonder how the two sexes ever got together. Men talk sports and cars and maybe politics. Women talk emotions. At least that's the stereotype and that's the pigeonhole which writer-director Tom Gilroy aims to explode in "Spring Forward." As co-artistic director of the New York theater company Machine Full, Gilroy is a man of the stage, not the screen, which becomes obvious early on in his feature film debut. He'd be the envy of Eric Rohmer and a whole band of French scripters, given the incessant dialogue that Gilroy feeds to his crackerjack actors in what is essentially a two-character filmed play-cum-Connecticut foliage. Marred by some indistinct vocal fidelity and photographer Terry Stacey's occasional lapses (in one instance, he muffs the opportunity to exploit the energy of some mixed Labrador puppies), "Spring Forward" nonetheless gives its audience some more exposure to the talents of Liev Schreiber and Ned Beatty, the latter a veteran of the screen with oodles of awards and Oscar nominations, the former becoming one of the hottest names in the industry.

"Spring Forward," so-named because Gilroy takes us through four seasons (and seven scenes) in the lives of the 30-year-old Paul (Liev Schreiber) and the 65-year-old Murphy (Ned Beatty), furnishes us a story of two flawed individuals ironing out each other's shortcomings, bonding gloriously despite their differences in age and outlook. Murph, who is about to complete a career as a department of parks employee, has taken on a new co-worker, Paul, who had recently emerged from an 18-month stretch in prison for armed robbery of a Dunkin' Donuts store. His interval in the slammer has turned him into a reader, particularly of New Age philosophy, and he sprinkles his conversations regularly with terms like karma and the sayings of the Dalai Lama. He also has a penchant for using the "f" word, which his aging colleague dislikes intensely.

We can see from the start that the rough-around-the-edges Paul is going to get an object lesson in civilization from his new mentor while Murph, uptight and less willing than Paul to express his deeper feelings, will learn to open up and relax. In a sense the relationship between the two men is not unlike that of the four businessmen from Atlanta in Beatty's debut as an actor, John Boorman's 1972 "Deliverance." This time around, just two men will get more than they bargained for, though their experiences in no way match the thrills of Boorman's canoe trip.

Stretches of real physical action come and go with no follow-up--the sex-hungry Paul meets a lonely woman; the two men discover a strange fellow who seems to live under a house; Paul and Murphy refuse to help load a truck with fertilizer because the spoiled young man who asks them to do so refuses to help; Paul seeks to rescue a battered, hysterical woman who has run away from home with her frightened daughter. Gilroy appears to have no need to wrap things up, to use these scenes as a foreshadowing of later events. In other words, the action regularly springs forward but never falls backward. Instead, the movie is content to spotlight the relationship of these two ordinary men (who in modern, trendy language could be considered a couple of white guys sitting around talking), each of whom provides deliverance for the other. This is the sort of film that could ideally be enjoyed on the tube, valuable as show pieces for the two fine performers.

Rated R. Running time: 110 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com

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