BEING FLYNN (Paul Weitz). 95 minutes. Opens Friday (March 16). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NN
There are movies about homelessness and mental illness that deal with the subject head-on, confronting us with hard truths about how people end up in hopeless situations. Being Flynn is not one of them.
Instead, writer/director Paul Weitz (Little Fockers) has turned Nick Flynn’s memoir, Another Bullshit Night In Suck City, into a cookie-cutter drama about a young shelter worker who learns a valid lesson about stability from a homeless person. The twist is that the homeless person is the young man’s father, who’s reappeared after nearly two decades.
Paul Dano is the younger Flynn, and Robert De Niro the elder, Jonathan, and that’s a problem right there: Dano’s introverted performance crumples in the face of De Niro’s grandstanding turn.
We’re supposed to be watching the younger man come to terms with his father and himself, but his dad keeps sucking all the air out of the room.
