Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Maltin, Leonard [105]
Goodman grew up on the streets of South Boston, a world all its own. He and his best pal (played by Mark Ruffalo and Ethan Hawke, respectively) started out as punk kids, running errands for a local hood and learning not to ask questions. A decade later, as young men, nothing has changed, except that now, Ruffalo has a family. He’s never accepted responsibility for anything in life; he’s just taken things as they come, going from one small-time “job” to another. Inevitably, he and Hawke wind up in prison where they serve five years.
When Ruffalo is released he quickly discovers that adjusting to normal life is hard enough; trying to go straight and stay away from booze makes it even tougher, and a neighborhood police detective (played by Donnie Wahlberg, who cowrote the screenplay) is always on his case, refusing to give him the benefit of the doubt in any situation.
Told in outline form the story may sound familiar. What sets this movie apart is its brutal honesty; there isn’t a false note in the picture.
In real life, Goodman faced all the challenges we see his character contend with on-screen. He started acting in the late 1990s and won small roles in several films shot in Boston (Monument Ave. and Southie, which starred Donnie Wahlberg); this was an especially lucky break because at that time he wasn’t allowed to leave the state! In time he made his way to Hollywood. When he worked for Steven Spielberg, first in Catch Me If You Can and then in Munich, he spent every spare moment observing the director at work.
Eventually he started putting his story down on paper, and with the help of Wahlberg and Paul T. Murray, turned it into a screenplay. He then impressed a producer and a financier—and ultimately his actors—with his utter conviction to tell the story as honestly as possible. That included shooting the entire movie in Boston, often on the actual locations where incidents took place.
Mark Ruffalo and Ethan Hawke are superb. And Goodman fares well on camera playing Pat Kelly, the neighborhood racketeer.
What Doesn’t Kill You opened in the midst of the busy December 2008 movie season in New York and Los Angeles just as its distributor, Yari Film Group, went out of business (more or less). Like Nothing But the Truth (written and directed by Rod Lurie, who also coproduced this movie) it never played elsewhere and made its DVD debut in the spring of 2009. If ever a film deserved a second chance, this one does.
146. THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD
(1996)
Directed by Dan Ireland
Screenplay by Michael Scott Myers
Based on the memoir One Who Walked Alone by Novalyne Price Ellis
Actors:
VINCENT D’ONOFRIO
RENÉE ZELLWEGER
ANN WEDGEWORTH
HARVE PRESNELL
BENJAMIN MOUTON
MICHAEL CORBETT
HELEN CATES
At the same time moviegoers were discovering Renée Zellweger in the smash hit Jerry Maguire, a distributor was attempting to generate interest in a much smaller-scale film featuring the young actress—but without the name value of Tom Cruise to help it along.
The Whole Wide World is a compelling drama about a most unusual relationship between a prim, unworldly Texas schoolteacher and aspiring writer named Novalyne Price and an eccentric but fascinating young man named Robert E. Howard. He lives with his mother, talks out loud as he clatters away on his typewriter, and has few if any social skills, but unlike Novalyne he is making a living through his words—as the creator of the pulp magazine heroes Conan the Barbarian and Kull the Conqueror!
Howard is played by the gifted Vincent D’Onofrio, whose attention-grabbing performance in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) propelled him to the front ranks of young character actors. Subsequent films include Mystic Pizza, JFK, Ed Wood (in a memorable cameo as Orson Welles),