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Lonely are the (New York) Brave
by Pam Grady |
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9/27/2006 at 4:18:10 PM |
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Manhattan and its environs are the true stars of two films currently playing in limited release, Ed Burns’ Looking for Kitty and Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart. The two dramas are wildly different, yet they are essentially about the same thing: loneliness. And in both, New York is more than a location, it a character in the movie.
Burns’ film sat on a shelf for a couple of years, something evident from taxi ads trumpeting Bernadette Peters in Gypsy, as well as co-star David Krumholtz’s appearance, looking nothing like Numbers’ soulful math geek Charlie Epps. Looking for Kitty is a private eye movie of sorts, only one with no real mystery.
Upstate New York football coach Abe (Krumholtz) hires Jack (Burns) to track down his wife Kitty who dumped him for an English rock star. Jack needs the money, but he doesn’t need the grief, especially when this tourist in the too-thin jacket insists on tagging along on the investigation. But Jack isn’t all that different from Abe, except he is widowed.
Both are alone and both are eccentric – Abe won’t eat any food he deems "foreign", while Jack always orders takeout because he cannot stand eating around other people in restaurants. Abe is very much a small-town rube and Jack is the urban sharpie, but as they bond in their grief over their missing women, they become friends. Looking for Kitty is a small film, but it is sweet. Burns and Krumholtz are very good in portraying Jack and Abe’s need to re-establish a human connection.
But there is loneliness... and then, there is loneliness. At least, Jack and Abe find amity in each other, in contrast to Man Push Cart’s Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi). Like Jack, he’s a widower, but in far more dire straits.
For one thing, he is also a father and his mother-in-law is turning him into a stranger to his son by keeping the boy away from him. For another, in Pakistan, he was a rock star, but now he is barely scraping by with his job manning a coffee cart on a Manhattan street corner.
Things seem to be looking up when a yuppie customer Mohammed (Charles Daniel Sandoval) recognizes him and enthusiastically offers to help re-ignite Ahmad’s music career. And there is also a comely new clerk, Noemi (Leticia Dolera) at the nearby newsstand who catches his eye. He even finds a kitten and takes it home to ease his solitary night.
Bahrani, in only his second feature, offers an absolutely heart-rending story in following Ahmad’s seesawing emotions between hope and despair. And he’s made quite a find in Razvi, a one-time pushcart vendor in real life, who makes a stunning film debut.
As engaging as the story and the actor are, what makes Man Push Cart special is its many street scenes of pre-dawn New York, as Ahmad weaves his cart through traffic. It is a sleeping city that Ahmad maneuvers through, except for the club kids calling it a night and those like him, the vendors, cabbies, truckers, cops, and all manner of service provides who are up and about hours before everyone else keeping the city humming and preparing it for a new day. The images are at once prosaic and poetic, and completely unforgettable.
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