May 7, 1988 | Playwright John Patrick Shanley wrote the script for Five Corners long before turning his attention to Moonstruck, the film for which he earned this year’s Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. And yet, while Moonstruck is by far a better film, Five Corners is in many ways more audacious, more daredevil quirky, in its wild swings from comedy to romance to melodrama.
Director Tony Bill (My Bodyguard) clearly appreciates the vitality and originality of Shanley, a major new movie talent, and has done little to impose conventional rhythms or structure on the script’s freewheeling, almost chaotic inventions. Five Corners is the sort of script a writer may write only once, before he learns you’re not supposed to write movies like this, and Bill wants us to savor every contradictory, cheerfully jumbled-up moment.
To be sure, in the final half-hour or so, Shanley himself sets some creaky plot machinery into motion, to provide predictable ironies in a suspenseful climax. Even then, however, Shanley has some tricks up his sleeve. This is a movie where a violent sociopath’s dotty mother is unexpectedly overjoyed when her son carries a kidnapped woman into their apartment. “Oh!” she gushes. “You brought home a friend!”
The setting is a Bronx neighborhood in 1964, a time when good girls didn’t, bad kids sniffed glue to get high, and nightly newscasts were full of reports about Deep South freedom marches. Harry (Tim Robbins), an idealistic young man with violence in his past, wants to turn the other cheek and involve himself in the civil rights movement. But his pacifism is sorely tested by the return of Heinz (John Turturro), a hulking thug newly released from prison.
Years before, Heinz tried to rape Linda (Jodie Foster), the object of his obsessions, and was prevented only by Harry’s intervention. Now Heinz is back in the neighborhood, and Linda is very, very nervous.
Meanwhile, an impatient ladies’ man pays two neighborhood guys five bucks to take a pair of glue-sniffing, good-time girls off his hands. And a harried police detective searches in vain for the killer of a high-school teacher. The mystery is profoundly confusing, the cop says, because the victim was found with an arrow in his back. And, as everybody knows, “There ain’t no Indians in the Bronx.”
The characters and subplots collide and intertwine over a 36-hour period in Five Corners. Quite often, a humorous or gently sweet moment will turn dark and threatening. An awkward courtship explodes into violence. Two couples begin a childish game, then risk their lives in an elevator shaft. But not all the sudden shifts involve physical danger. In one of the movie’s best scenes, Harry meets a black civil rights activist, expecting to be welcomed into the movement. Something else happens instead.
Bill isn’t able to cover all the seams, to make all the transitions smooth. And maybe he was wise not to try — the abrupt changes in tone and emotion are part of the idiosyncratic charm of Five Corners. But to give Bill credit, he evokes the period flavor with great conviction. And he does a fine job of merging the diverse performances of his excellent ensemble cast.
Jodie Foster is very appealing, even though it’s a little disturbing to find her in an on-screen relationship that recalls her real-life troubles with John Hinckley Jr. Tim Robbins persuasively conveys the power of Harry’s convictions and the discomfort of his moral quandary. Todd Graff is very good as a weak man who wants to be brave, even when he shouldn’t be, as James, Linda’s boyfriend.
And best of all, there is John Turturro as Heinz, a nightmarish yet oddly pathetic brute who always hurts the ones he loves. Turturro is first among equals, dominating Five Corners with a performance of fearsome rage and unfulfilled yearning.
