ON SCREEN: Caught

[eye WEEKLY]

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eye WEEKLY October 10, 1996
Toronto's arts newspaper .....free every Thursday
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ON SCREEN ON SCREEN

CAUGHT
Starring Edward James Olmos, Maria Conchita Alonso. Screenplay by
Edward Pomerantz. Directed by Robert Young. (AA)

(eee of 5 eyes)

by
GEMMA FILES

"Ultimately," says director Robert Young, "I don't think we ever
really get away with anything. We plot and we plan, we lose sleep over
our own motivations. The results of our actions are rarely ever worth
the effort we put into them, and the price is always too high. But
that's not what scares us. What we're afraid of... is getting caught."

Keeping this in mind, we turn to Young's latest movie (named Caught,
strangely enough), an adaptation of screenwriter Edward Pomerantz's
edgy, intimate, emotionally brutal original novel, Into It which Young
optioned for filming over 23 years ago.

The plot is a fairly simple one: Drifter Nick (Irish-born actor Arie
Verveen, making his feature debut) avoids the police by ducking into a
New York fish shop owned by Joe (Edward James Olmos); Joe offers Nick
a job, a home and his trust, all of which Nick quickly betrays by
falling into bed with Joe's dissatisfied wife, Betty (Maria Conchita
Alonso). And after Joe's estranged son Danny (fringe comedian/rocker
Steven Schub, in a blazingly repulsive and vulnerable performance)
returns to find a stranger shacking up with his far-too-beloved
mother, Nick's false paradise soon comes to a quick and dirty end.

Everybody involved acts like a human being, not some neo-noir cliche.
Nick is young and callow, needier than even he suspects. Joe's canny
enough to smell a rat, but lonely enough not to put down poison until
he knows exactly whose cheese is being eaten. Betty's bored and lost,
swept away by her rediscovered capacity for pleasure, unable to see
how her constant flirtation has turned Danny into a tragic ruin of
lost possibilities. Malformed by thwarted hopes and muffled desires,
the characters all deserve a bit more leniency from life than they've
had so far -- and none of them gets it.

"I've already heard people calling it The Fishman Always Rings Twice,"
Young observes, "which I think is pretty facile. The movie never
claims to just be about whether or not Arie and Maria are going to get
together -- of course they are, it's obvious. What I'm much more
interested in is why they insist on doing this thing they know will
lead to nothing but pain and suffering, and how they deal with having
done it."

Previously best known for his documentaries, as well as for co-
producing and co-screenwriting director Michael Roemer's award-winning
Nothing But A Man (1964), Young first began directing his own features
in 1977. Since then, his eclectic choice of projects has ranged from
critics' favorites The Ballad Of Gregorio Cotez (1982) and Dominick
And Eugene (1988) to rather more dicey fare -- like One Trick Pony
(1980), the universally panned acting/ screenwriting debut of musician
Paul Simon.

Young, however, regrets nothing.

"I don't commit to films that don't speak to me personally," he says.
"If you do that, you're tricking people into giving up part of their
lives, on the assumption that they can just lie back, switch their
brain off, and let the movie take over for a while. That concept is
potentially very destructive, especially if all you have to offer is
something you don't believe in.

"I don't think we're victims, and I don't believe in fate -- but the
way the world works is often deliberately cruel, and we all know the
result. On the other hand, I bet you five bucks nothing ever happened
in the Garden of Eden worth making a movie about. No shame, no pain,
no gain. And no stories."

He smiles. "And who wants to live like that?"

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