# Six Ways to Sunday (1998)

### reviewed by
Dennis Schwartz

SIX WAYS TO SUNDAY (director: Adam Bernstein; screenwriter: Marc Gerald/ the 1962 novel "Portrait of a Young Man Drowning" by Charles Perry; cinematographer: John Inwood; editor: Doug Abel; cast: Norman Reedus (Harry Odum), Deborah Harry (Kate Odum), Adrien Brody (Arnie Finklestein), Peter Appel (Abie Pinkwise), Elina Lowensohn (Iris), Jerry Adler (Louis Varga), Isaac Hayes (Bill Bennett), Holter Graham (Madden), Anna Thompson (Annibelle, prostitute), Vincent Pastore (Uncle Max), 1999)

    Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

A sometimes funny parody and uncanny black comedy, about incest, sexual repression, and the Jewish mob. But its failure to be consistently on focus with its characters' comings and goings, in what seems like a pointless amount of gore being displayed, acts to undermine the film's artful plot set-up. As the film is too often off target, bringing up too many subjects for it to handle, it just fires away, taking aim at everything in its way and missing just as often as it hits.

It is set in the seedy neighborhoods of Youngstown, Ohio, and its focus is on a gentile, overbearing mother and her psychopathic son, who live in a depressing house. Kate Odum (Deborah Harry) is the mother who still bathes her son and dominates his life by keeping him from girls, telling him women just want to use sex to get their hooks in a guy, "Girls today are no good. They're sluts."While she acts to discourage him about sex, yet she flaunts her sex in front of him, wearing sexy underclothes in front of him. He is a repressed, virginal 18-year-old, named Harry (Norman Reedus-ex-model for Prado), with deep-rooted psychological problems. He talks to his alter ego, whom he names Madden (Graham), and easily loses sight of reality, not able to tell at times if he is Madden or himself. Madden is everything he is not, self-assured and sexually fit. In otherwords, Harry is a certifiable nutcase.

Harry has conflicting feelings about sex, sometimes when frustrated, he gets very angry and violent, but at other times he is like a docile lamb. He works at odd-jobs and at a fast-food place. When he goes out for the first time on a "schlumping" with his best friend Arnie Finklestein (Brody), who is a crack addict working for the Jewish mob, he gets to beat an owner of a strip-joint senseless after watching the nude dancers perform. What upsets him after he sees the naked women, is that Arnie does not beat the guy hard enough. He is welcomed into the mob because, as Arnie's mobster boss says, the deadbeat learnt his lesson and paid the loan sharks off what he owes them.

The hitman for the gang, Abie Pinkwise (Peter Appel), an orphan but raised by a gangster uncle, takes it upon himself to teach Harry the ropes, and makes him his right-hand enforcer. While visiting the big bosses' house, Louis Varga (Adler), Harry eyeballs a Hungarian immigrant maid, Iris (Lowensohn), and is attracted to her because she walks with a limp and he thereby strikes up a strange romance with her. But his mother acts to thwart that romance when he brings her over to the house. Mama can never let go of her little baby boy.

How the film got its title, is forced into one of the scenes, when a policeman on the mob's payroll, Isaac Hayes, beats Harry up in the stationhouse to determine if he's a squealer, but Harry fights back and busts his nose. The breaking of the nose gives rise to the saying, I could have beaten him six ways to Sunday.

Harry becomes a full-fledged hitman, and gets to enjoy doing some violent hits. His mentor Abie treats him like a son, while his boss Louis is pleased with his work and rewards him with a lot of money. Harry, as a result, buys his mother a new house, though she still brings with her all her old junk, the main staple being, a living room lounge chair that sags to the floor when you sit on it.

There is no smooth sailing in this difficult story to behold, which might have something to do with love. If love is the message here, it is not the conventional kind, but it is one that is stranger and stronger than Harry's repressions, hatred and violence. Everytime one looks up on the screen, someone seems to be getting violently bumped off, yet Harry manages to survive and will leave Youngstown with Iris by the film's end, which, oddly enough, after all the mayhem and absurdity of Harry's insane life, the film turns out to have a temporarily happy ending. This might be the strangest thing about this film, for a film that has gone out of its way to be stranger than fiction or love. This film should appeal mostly to those who like offbeat stories and their comedy to be darker than black, and don't mind if confusion is the main ingredient that propels the story. I took it at face value to be black comedy and found myself laughing often, though the people I saw it with, thought it was over-the-top in blood and gore, and found little in it to like and found the film was far too self-indulgent to work as a love story for them.

    REVIEWED ON 5/30/2000     GRADE: C+

Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"

    http://www.sover.net/~ozus

    ozus@sover.net

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