Tag Archives: Yolanda Ross

Forget & Forgive

Absolution

by Daniel Baldwin

Sixteen years ago, a then-52-year-old Liam Neeson starred in the action-thriller Taken and his career completely changed. While he’s still made a few notable dramas since, the bulk of his work post-2008 has been in the action realm. This resulted in plenty of gems, particularly in his work with filmmakers Jaume Collet-Serra and Joe Carnahan. But it has also resulted in many duds over the last five years. The once-dependable aging action king began pumping out dreck like Honest ThiefBlacklight, and The Ice Road.

Lucky for us, Absolution is a big step back in the right direction. This film sees Neeson reteaming with his Cold Pursuit director Hans Petter Moland for a crime drama that leans very heavily on the drama side of the equation. This time ‘round, Neeson plays an aging gangster who is having a rough go of things. His memory isn’t what it used to be – sometimes to the point where he forgets where his house is – and that’s not a healthy problem to have when you work for a Boston mob boss (Ron Perlman), even if he is your longtime friend. This issue is further compounded by the fact that Neeson’s stuck babysitting Perlman’s son (Daniel Diemer), who is as entitled as he is inept.

With his mental faculties on the wane, our antihero decides its high-time to rekindle some sort of relationship with his daughter (Frankie Shaw) and grandson (Terrence Pulliam), while also striking up a romance with a local woman (Yolanda Ross). He’s a bad, broken man nearing the end of the road, trying to find a measure of goodness and forgiveness to cling to before he leaves this world behind. There’s a deep sorrow at the core of Neeson’s performance, showcased not only in his interactions with his limited number of loved ones, but also in a series of surrealist dreams about his own father (Josh Drennen).

This isn’t new territory. Toss a rock at the filmographies of earlier aging action heroes like Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood and you will find at least a few similar films. It isn’t even new ground for Neeson, whose 2022 film Memory saw the actor as an assassin dealing with memory issues.

What sets Absolution apart is Hans Petter Moland. Moreso than Cold Pursuit or even Out Stealing Horses, Moland charges at it all head on with his penchant for lush, pensive visuals and aforementioned surrealism, turning an airport novel tale into something a bit more. This results in Neeson’s best genre flick since The Marksman and his best performance since Scorsese’s Silence.

Sayles’s Sisters Deserved Better

Go For Sisters

by Hope Madden

Writer/director John Sayles has built a career on character driven independents and stories that tell uniquely American tales. His latest, Go for Sisters, is a simply stated effort about the value of hard-won relationships.

LisaGay Hamilton plays Bernice, a no-nonsense parole officer who bends her strident ways when her childhood friend Fontayne (an exceptional Yolanda Ross) becomes her client. Fontayne recently found herself in the company of a felon, which breaks her parole. But where Fontayne lives, felons are just about the only company possible to keep.

Fontayne knows the score, predicting Bernice’s thoughts based on prior experience. “This sorry girl ain’t got her shit together. We gon’ have to lock her up some more.”

To Fontayne’s surprise, Bernice relents. But where Bernice should reassign Fontayne to another parole officer, instead she enlists her help to find her own missing son, an ex-soldier gone missing and likely mixed up in something dodgy.

Though both performances, and that of Edward James Olmos as the retired cop helping them track the missing man, are very strong, Sayles strings together scenes with no panache at all, creating something akin to TV detective show. The plot is so plainly laid out that it becomes an afterthought, no doubt because Sayles’s interest lies with the characters, not their adventure. But the audience has to feel compelled by both.

The adventure contains too many clandestine meetings and coincidences for the investigation to carry the weight of authenticity, and Sayles never mines for real plot-driven tension. It’s far too light a touch given the circumstances of the kidnapping.

Instead, Sayles wonders about the reasons the two women lost each other twenty years ago, and the paths they took to such different lives, and then come back to each other. Theirs is a poignant and probably very familiar kind of struggle, and it deserves our attention. It’s just too bad Sayles had to drag us all across the American Southwest and into Mexico to discover it.

 

Verdict-2-5-Stars

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w0mA6Sg_gs