Brooklyn Rules (2006)

If you like TV mini-series, you'll probably enjoy Brooklyn Rules. It's a nearly perfect specimen of that genre. It clearly is designed for the USA Network (or TNT -- We Know Drama!). How it ended up in theatrical release is beyond me. When I troop out to a theater, clocking in all that travel time, the last thing I want to see is television. Alec Baldwin looms large in the print ads, but he's only in a few scenes. The movie belongs to Freddie Prinze Jr., who's the quintessence of a television actor. I could even see him as a talk-show host. He probably could do more, but either he's chosen to limit himself or no serious producers will hire him. It's probably a little of both. Prinze plays a boy growing up in 1970s-80s Brooklyn. He has two best friends, and we watch them experience late adolescence as a trio. We get the standard TV caricatures: one boy goes to college, one flirts with joining the mob, and one seems destined to work in the Post Office. Alec Baldwin plays one of the local mob figures. The central drama surrounds the college boy's experience learning the ways of the Manhattan bourgeoisie (the college he goes to is Columbia), and the mob-wannabe trying to decide if he should join organized crime. One sidelight to the drama is that a lot of mob history is imparted. I never knew, for example, that there was a terribly bloody succession struggle whose victor was John Gotti. In the 1980s the last thing I cared about was staying on top of the NYC mob. Surprisingly, there are quite a few good laughs in the script, mostly in the form of banter between the boys. One boy has an unusual flair when it comes to fashion. When he dons an argyle sweater, his buddy says he looks like "the Italian Fred MacMurray." I howled at that. The greatest pleasure I had in Brooklyn Rules were the handful of times Alec Baldwin came on-screen. His mixture of menace and grace was quite profound; a heady cinematic cocktail that was infinitely more interesting than anything I've seen from James Gandolfini. Baldwin's blue eyes never looked more piercing and scary. He gives movie-star charisma such a good name. I believe Baldwin has talent at the level of Sean Penn, but I sense that Baldwin himself doesn't believe that's the case. If he believed in his own talent more, I think he'd be rolling in Oscars. I sense some kind of hesitation in him that prevents his performances from really breaking through.