Steve Buscemi's debut as a writer and director, an almost shrinkingly modest independent film about and around the clientele of a Long Island neighborhood watering hole, a shades-of-gray corner building with a spindly sapling planted in the sidewalk out front. In his directing hat, he is meticulously observant of the faces, the postures, the gestures of barflies: the epicene slug and his well-suited mate perched on stools at the end of the bar; the brooder with the deteriorating hygiene (his wife has just walked out on him with their child) at the other end; the vacant, quasi-mystical stare of the most religiously devoted drinker, a prune-face who can waste no word or motion on matters unrelated to his regimen of alcohol consumption. In his writing hat, Buscemi is a bit more fitfully observant of the banality of bar talk ("Pretty name for a pretty girl"), more prone to poetic and comic license ("Now I got it embezzled in my head"). The accumulation of little truths and little amusements in the lives of little people never amounts to more than a little. And the implied fate of the protagonist (Buscemi himself) at the fadeout seems rather heavy in relation to the overall weight of the previous events: a case of too much, too late. That apart, the movie is something of a marvel of nonjudgmentalism, neither sentimentalizing nor stigmatizing its hero (or anybody else). It would be understandable if, around closing time, Buscemi felt he had not said quite enough about his character, and forgivable if he attempted all at once to make up for it. With Mark Boone Junior, Anthony LaPaglia, Elizabeth Bracco, Carol Kane, Daniel Baldwin, Mimi Rogers, Chloe Sevigny. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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