# Illtown (1996)

### reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten

ILLTOWN By Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Releasing Co. tba Director: Nick Gomez Writer: Nick Gomez Cast: Michael Rapaport, Lili Taylor, Adam Trese, Kevin Corrigan, Angela Featherstone, Tony Danza, Isaac Hayes, Paul Schulze, Saul Stein Like Spike Lee's "Clockers," "Illtown" features a cluster of vicious teens teamed up with adult drug dealers. But it's not about drugs. A cop is on the take from the peddlers. Still it's not about drugs. Merchants are assassinated for ripping off distributors of cocaine and crack and for contaminating the powders that lead to OD's. Even then, it's not about drugs. According to Nick Gomez, whose previous features of wayward youth are "New Jersey Drive" and "Laws of Gravity," this latest film which was selected for the 1996 New York Film Festival is about nothing less than guilt, demons, and redemption, even featuring one character, Isaac Hayes, who is named George but is really God; another named Dante who must suffer a daily inferno of his own consciousness; and a brutal but charming criminal named Gabriel, who is, of course none other than the archangel himself. Mr. Gomez has taken on quite a project for his relatively brief film, which he made for a sum of less than five million dollars, and which at the time of its film festival screening is looking for a distributor. While the Scorsese-like genre which includes ruthless young people looks somewhat like his two previous offerings, he has taken a sharp turn from making fairly realistic works to moving into the Bunuelesque area of the surreal. His "Laws of Gravity" (1991) is a chronicle of three momentous days in the lives of a pair of young, blue-collar, Brooklyn thieves and their girlfriends. A gritty work. His "New Jersey Drive" (1995) deals with two teens from Newark, New Jersey, who are drawn into the underground carjacking network and find the weight of local police upon them. Also gritty. But gritty is just an incidental way of describing "Illtown," which is visually rich in an almost pious selection of dreams, ghosts, and metaphysical encounters, but is ultimately an unholy mess. Presumably influenced by the Spanish master of the surreal, Luis Bunuel, Mr. Gomez has a way to go before he can approach that filmmaker's style, techniques, and depth of social criticism. His central character is Dante (Michael Rapaport), a tense personality with a well-honed red beard, who is plagued by guilt over his past participation in the drug trade. Now a nice guy who, like some of the younger pushers in the Miami community, just wants to be a regular family person with his woman, Suzanne (Lily Taylor), he finds himself overwhelmed with hallucination and dreams of his dark days in the trade. He is alternately in a graffiti-strewn tunnel shooting up--or facing down a young punk who wasted his best friend in a shootout that seems out of the parched west rather than the subtropical American south. Another figure in his imagination is a corrupt cop, Lucas (Paul Schulze), who shows up at convenient times to collect what's his, and ends up getting exactly what he deserves. The worst of the bunch is the ever-smiling, handsomely bland-looking Gabriel (Adam Trese), who smiles when beaten and looks ecstatic when shot, as though in being tortured he has attained redemption for once ordering multiple assassinations and callously shooting down people who he feels have ripped him off. From time to time the drama--which is replete with characters conjured up like apparitions--is presided over by George (Isaac Hayes), who combines the righteousness of a social worker with the vindictive threats of The Deity, while Dante's woman, Suzanne (Lily Taylor), works out her own conflicts with her mother over her brother--a deaf mute who has run away from Boston and driven eighteen hours to her place in Miami. On the one hand, writer-director Nick Gomez--whose script is based only very loosely on the novel "The Cocaine Kids"-- insists that everything is metaphysical, that nothing is real. On the other, he punctuates his criticism of society for its blase treatment of teen killings as merely fodder for the evening news. Unlike Bunuel he seems to have little use for the sporadic light touch or moments of wit, so that the repeated entries of ghostly figures and flashbacks guided by Dante's unconscious mind become wearisome, even pointless. Rated R. Running Time: 97 minutes. (C) 1996 Harvey Karten

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