Movie Review: "White Irish Drinkers" (2010)

The movie is well done and the acting stellar. But it is burdened with a hackneyed plot: talented kid seeks to escape the stranglehold of his low-life culture, but family loyalties are ties not easily broken. This version takes us into the clutches of 1975 Irish-Americans, living their dreary lives in Brooklyn. The talented misfit is an artist with a drunken father, a weak mother, and a gangbanger older brother. The only question for the audience is whether it will end in despair or with a little Hollywood high-five.

Yes, the plot is a universal one: you love your family, but you need to escape it and find your own way... A coming-of-age story. This one bothered me because the mother Margaret (Karen Allen) was such a beat-down martyr. Bad enough that the father (Stephen Lang) was the worst kind of put-your-dukes-up cliché of an Irish drunk. But the movie didn't live up to the flip side of the stereotype: the Irish woman who takes charge and who goes all out on behalf of her sons... or at least screams bloody murder about it.

In the end I just wound up being mad at the whole lot of them.