"Is This the Family Gun, Dad?" At Close Range

By RICHARD CORLISS

Andrew Wyeth painted landscapes of this bucolic stretch of Pennsylvania, but could he ever have imagined these small, warped figures inhabiting them? Brad Whitewood Sr. (Christopher Walken) runs a scuzzy gang that makes millions breaking into company safes and hijacking tractors. His estranged wife and her mother slouch around their dreary house staring at TV. Brad Jr. (Sean Penn) is searching for something worth spending his teenage energy on: maybe his lay-about friends, maybe that cute 16-year-old he's just met (Mary Stuart Masterson), maybe the toxic dream of emulating his old man. You've got to act, Brad. So be a thief and impress your friends. Join your dad's gang; make him proud. Buy your girlfriend a necklace and watch her eyes pop. Be a man and try not to look back at that trail of blood on the landscape.

Most movies about low-life Americana condescend to their subject with lots of sweat, foul patter, fat ladies and idiot giggling. This lurid and intermittently seductive melodrama (based on a true story) just observes Brad Sr. and his mob dispassionately, like slime mold under a microscope. They execute their robberies, and their victims, with soulless professionalism; their gangster grimaces register starkness without sexiness. Brad Jr. and his pals are hardly more exemplary. Talking tough, swigging beer, waiting for something bad to happen, they could be the Whitewood Gang in embryo.

But Director James Foley (Reckless) wants to iconize the whole pathetic crowd with his wide-screen technique. The telephoto lens sets small-town streets ashiver; dramatic lighting illuminates a face from no earthly source. The two Brads share an idyllic toke of "wacky tobaccy," gazing out at the rolling Appalachian farmland. Brad Sr. sits at the center of a Last Supper tableau of thieves, looking like Jesus looking for Judas. Every overwrought gesture, every pregnant banality, every brutal killing is elongated to impress upon us the moment's importance and sick beauty. This fetishized attention to detail produces some gorgeous picturemaking, even as it makes At Close Range a sort of Atrocity Olympics captured in Super SloMo.

Foley gives his actors a lot of rope, and the option of lassoing their characters or hanging themselves. Within the strictures and excesses of Method acting, most of them do just fine. Christopher Penn (Sean's brother) is good as a slow wit with a long fuse; Eileen Ryan (Sean's and Christopher's mother) plays their grandma as a silent witness against familial treachery. Masterson has a face and a talent worth watching. Walken, flashing Faginese charm across his splendidly wasted face, is a monster any son could find walking into his nightmares.

Sean Penn is tops. Madonna's bad boy was a wartime swain in Racing with the Moon, a pinwheeling bozo in The Falcon and the Snowman. Here he is all static electricity, forcing a smile through the sour taste in his mouth, weighing filial devotion against conventional morality, trying to figure out what his body will tell his brain to do next. And when, at the climax, he confronts Brad Sr. over a string of domestic crimes ("Is this the family gun, Dad?"), Penn gives the movie, and his career to date, a sensational payoff. Worry over the film's shortcomings while you watch it, but put this performance in the time capsule.