Having sleepwalked through his last two dozen or so films Robert DiNero gives his best since the mid nineties as a washed up taxi driver in Being Flynn. It's no Bickle or La Motta but it's a worthy lion in winter turn that up until now was glaringly missing from the canon of an admirable career give or take thirty or so films.
Nick Flynn (Paul Dano) trying to find some direction in his life begins to work at a homeless center when he get's a call from his long absent, dead beat father, Jonathan (DiNero) in need of his pick-up because he's being evicted. From there Jonathan begins to spiral and ultimately ends up at the center where Nick and dad fail to bond. Nick soon finds himself sliding as well.
DiNero keeps Flynn at arms length from audience sympathy with a performance that softens only slightly at the end. Unrepenant, delusional (he considers himself a writer of the first rank) there's no getting close no matter how much Nick enables the old man with the only flashes of revelation for one or both driven home by director Paul Weitz with flashbacks of his deceased mother (Julianne Moore).
Moore and Dano mold well to the film's oppressive mood with its setting of grinding poverty, drug use and the inability to connect but the plot's glum mood and Nick's passive response becomes leaden without much advancement. Weitz lays it on thick with some heavy handed flashbacks since their is little room to grow with father and son remaining at an impasse. Abandoning any hint of comedy relief his vision remains unremittingly dour and the nature of the films backdrop begins to limp along with monotonous montage before a semi- redemptive climax ties things together; perhaps a little too neat, though with the irascible Flynn you never can tell what the future holds.
Nick Flynn (Paul Dano) trying to find some direction in his life begins to work at a homeless center when he get's a call from his long absent, dead beat father, Jonathan (DiNero) in need of his pick-up because he's being evicted. From there Jonathan begins to spiral and ultimately ends up at the center where Nick and dad fail to bond. Nick soon finds himself sliding as well.
DiNero keeps Flynn at arms length from audience sympathy with a performance that softens only slightly at the end. Unrepenant, delusional (he considers himself a writer of the first rank) there's no getting close no matter how much Nick enables the old man with the only flashes of revelation for one or both driven home by director Paul Weitz with flashbacks of his deceased mother (Julianne Moore).
Moore and Dano mold well to the film's oppressive mood with its setting of grinding poverty, drug use and the inability to connect but the plot's glum mood and Nick's passive response becomes leaden without much advancement. Weitz lays it on thick with some heavy handed flashbacks since their is little room to grow with father and son remaining at an impasse. Abandoning any hint of comedy relief his vision remains unremittingly dour and the nature of the films backdrop begins to limp along with monotonous montage before a semi- redemptive climax ties things together; perhaps a little too neat, though with the irascible Flynn you never can tell what the future holds.