‘Antwone Fisher’ subtle, assured drama

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In theaters

ANTWONE FISHER, directed by Denzel Washington, written by Antwone Fisher, 113 minutes, rated PG-13. Now playing, Colonial Theatre, Belfast.

Denzel Washington’s “Antwone Fisher,” from a script Antwone Fisher based on his own life, is about a troubled sailor forced to face his demons with the help of a psychiatrist who is forced to face his own at home.

The film marks Washington’s first time as a director and it recalls a wealth of other movies, from “The Prince of Tides” and “Good Will Hunting” to “Ordinary People” and “Finding Forrester,” without becoming them.

It’s its own movie, an accomplishment George Clooney failed to achieve in his recent “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” which found the actor creating a film that wasn’t so much about Chuck Barris and his dual life as a game show host and CIA hitman, as it was a movie about a director pulling out his hair in a messy attempt to find a personal style.

This isn’t so for “Fisher.” Although the movie is formulaic and at times predictable, it’s also beautifully measured and assured, a confident, extraordinarily well-acted film about a man overcoming a dark life of murder, incest, abuse and abandonment.

In spite of what Fisher endured, the movie resists becoming the all-out melodrama it could have become in the wrong hands, which is surely its finest quality.

In the film, newcomer Derek Luke is Fisher, a young seaman whose blistering temper and eagerness to fight leads him to an appointment with Dr. Jerome Davenport (Washington), a naval psychiatrist with troubles of his own – his marriage to Berta (Salli Richardson) is on the rocks – who is unprepared for the emotional connection that will form between him and Fisher.

Fisher is just as unprepared. Indeed, after several sessions in which he stubbornly refuses to say anything, he eventually opens up to Davenport and shares his life, a horror story of the first order that began with his birth in prison to a mother who refused to care for him.

Bounced from a series of foster homes, he eventually came to the home of Mrs. Tate (Novella Nelson), a cruel preacher’s wife who refused to call Antwone and his two foster brothers by their real names. In spite of being black herself, she preferred to lash out and call them “niggers” while tying them up and beating them senseless.

I watched “Antwone Fisher” immediately preceding ABC’s “Living with Michael Jackson,” which wasn’t planned – it was just the way things worked out – but as the film ended and Jackson’s own story of child abuse and its ramifications began, the two stories gradually came to complement each other.

Here were two black men, abused as boys, who had everything against their becoming successful but who nevertheless achieved great success as adults. Seeing them both back-to-back deepened the cumulative effect, further elevating Fisher’s hard-won personal triumphs while creating a greater fracture in the troubled man Michael Jackson has become.

With an Academy Award-worthy performance by Luke and fine supporting turns by Joy Bryant as his love interest and Viola Davis as his mother, “Antwone Fisher” wisely holds back on delivering its emotional wallop until its well-deserved ending, which lifts this powerful movie off the screen while transcending the race and color boundaries that might unfortunately limit its commercial appeal.

Indeed, in the end, “Antwone Fisher” is about all of us.

Grade: A-

On video and DVD

MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING, directed by Joel Zwick. Written by Nia Vardalos. 95 minutes. Rated PG.

Joel Zwick’s hilarious comedy, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” begins on a high note and sustains it beautifully.

As the film opens, frumpy, 30-year-old Toula Portokalos (Nia Vardalos) is looking rather glum and desperate as her father, Gus (Michael Constantine), expresses his disappointment with her inability to find a man willing to marry her. “You’re looking old,” Gus says worriedly.

In an inspired flashback, the film jumps to the hell of Toula’s childhood, where we’re struck with the telltale truth of her unconventional appearance as a child. “I was a swarthy 6-year-old with sideburns,” she says – and she’s not kidding.

Fastforwarding to the present, Toula sums up her current problems with biting, yet understandable cynicism: “Like all Greek women, I was put on Earth to marry Greek boys, make Greek babies and feed everyone until the day I die.”

Well, maybe and maybe not.

The film, from a script Vardalos based on her own experiences and culled from her one-woman show, is about a bright yet sheltered woman who has been waiting three decades for her life to begin.

For her overbearing Greek family, that means following the same blueprint for wedded success that generations of other Greek women have followed. But for Toula, it means finding the courage to leave her family’s restaurant, the Dancing Zorbas, attend college – and find a man on her own terms.

With the help of her mother, Maria (Lainie Kazan), and her Aunt Voula (Andrea Martin), she does just that – and blooms into a beauty in the process.

But there’s a hitch: The man Toula falls in love with and plans to wed isn’t Greek at all. He’s a WASP named Ian Miller (John Corbett), a fact that sends Toula’s family straight into a tailspin – and leaves some of them rushing for the ouzo.

The film, which was released last April and which became the smash, $240 million sleeper hit of 2002, works because of the care and attention that went into the script and the creation of its characters.

It’s unabashedly formulaic and its laughs come almost entirely from its ethnic exaggerations, but its seams don’t rub against the screen and its jabs at Greek culture and Greek Americans are never cruel, which is key. Instead, the film is affectionate and loving, a spirit that sustains the movie and made it one of last year’s must-see comedies.

Grade: A-

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, Tuesdays and Thursdays on WLBZ 2 and WCSH 6, and are archived on RottenTomatoes.com. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.