I scribbled the following down as fast as I could. If I do it again tomorrow, it will read differently. We all like what we like, get moved by what moves us, diversity baby, and The Crossing Guard, in it’s grit & baseness & seediness & solitude & ultimate irony & trail to connectivity (& the look of fright and compassion in the eyes of the little girl when Freddy bursts into her room to hide, for example), moves me. Just stirs me.

The strip bar is Freddy’s family. (Believe me, I hate gratuitous use of actress breasts, but) the nudity doesn’t feel gratuitous at all in The Crossing Guard because it is what happens in Freddy’s “living” room. His ..interim sanctuary.

The Characters are drawn down, very “neighbors” real. John is so honest he’s like a monk in a monastery (or like Forest Whitaker in Ghost Dog). From the prison cell to the party to his mom & dad’s living room to the scene in the trailer (which was perfectly written, IMHO) to Jojo’s crib/dojo ..to the definitive chase/duet, he lives with death. His own death, and absolutely the death he caused, every moment is the sorrow and the sad wonder of his unexceptional purgatory. …I’ve said it before; I dig subtle, direct, portraits.

I could go on about Peter and Roger…and Jojo, all noteworthy, and Mary (who is stoic and persevering in her vow of silence), as they are all well written, well-acted, character bits that play out the adagio disposition on the pathway of an affecting storyline. I knew a guy like Peter back in the ol’ neighborhood. Blunt with a quip; ..pointed use of the “F” word; a shield of wry humor to ward off idiots and higher intellects; and a depth of wisdom & self-analysis beyond his age if you caught him @ the solemn hour. A while back I heard he died in a late night/early morning car accident. He was in the passenger seat. The driver, his long time friend who was at fault in the accident, lived…physically unharmed.

I find not one thing laughable about this film.

Growing up on the residential edge of the city, these people could easily have been my neighbors; they are not bigger than life and they are very at home on a small screen TV. The use of slow-motion to track Freddy while he moves amongst the hoi polloi through the hours before pride & relief, the clock ticking diversion away, the revisit of strip bar scenario, the goofballs in his living room, the rapport that the strippers have with him, the antihero he is to these goofballs in his living room, it is all relevant to the restrained but steady buildup of pressure and anticipated release of years of anguish, self-loathing, and tits & ass. & the strippers dig Freddy. He’s like dad, but so filled up with subdued/downcast emotion and the little Bukowski imp on his shoulder that he’s “fuckable daddy” Freddy.

He’s a jeweler; …but “the thing” and the strippers (girl distraction) are all he has…

…Until the Zen at the end. The labyrinths of Nietzsche & Jung. The Japanese Garden. The reason of unreason. The brief respite from torture in a moment of grace & human connectivity, ..and the red sky at night. Then we dry our eyes to Springsteen …and put the DVD (VHS) away for another year.

 

Come away, O human child!

to the waters and the wild

with a faery, hand in hand,

for the world’s more full of weeping

than you can understand…

~W.B. Yeats