MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Time of Destiny’ Lugs Heavy Load of Message

Occasionally a movie has too much motor for its axle, that’s pretty much the case with Gregory Nava’s and Anna Thomas’ “A Time of Destiny.” (selected theaters). This ‘40s-set saga of star-crossed lovers, vengeful fathers, warring families and strange blood-brotherhood comes weighted down with too many shades of significance, portentous overtones. The human drama inside--the wick needed to set it aflame--gets damped and pinched.

Time. Destiny. Love. Hate. War. Peace. Can the concepts get any heavier? Director-writer Nava and producer-writer Thomas show a California family, the Larranetas, torn apart when daughter Josie (Melissa Leo) elopes with cute serviceman Jack (Timothy Hutton) to the rage of her Basque dad (Francisco Rabal). Tragedy erupts, and the cycle continues when the Larraneta’s black sheep son, Marty--unknown to Jack--begins to stalk him through the Army, where both end up on the Italian front.

William Hurt plays Marty, and you can see why he wanted the role. Clearly a psychopath, obsessed with vindication, perhaps covertly attracted to Jack--Hurt’s Marty has such veined-temple intensity that he constantly seems on the verge of bursting his collar or swallowing his own lips. And when Nava and Thomas pull their outlandish plot twist--Marty and Jack becoming war buddies when each saves the other’s life--the possibilities seem rich.

Instead, the film gets stuck in lugubrious post-War pathology, then veers off into attempted fugues of wordless passion: mirrors, burning ropes, clutching hands--and a long, febrile homage to “Vertigo,” executed with the help of Hitchcock’s original art director, Henry Bumstead.

Nava is an excellent, lucid storyteller--virtues all on display in the knuckle-biting opener--but this movie lacks the passionate, epic simplicity of his “El Norte.” He’s succumbed to the kind of baroque temptations only geniuses can pull off, and his Freudian tragedy founders on limited means and thriller-soap opera motifs. Nava occasionally tries for a Sam Fuller-style audacity--like the camera’s “ride” on a mortar shell--but there are so many ironically linked transitions that you begin to wonder why he isn’t also going in for wipes, dissolves and heavenly choirs. Of the actors, only Stockard Channing, as Josie’s blabbermouth sister, stands outside the loom of fate, injecting a little humor.

Fate is the glue which holds this plot together. But, unlike, say, Conrad or Hardy, Nava can’t get an inexorable blind plunge of character. Here, technique and coincidences alike seem rickety, bogged down in a slightly cloying naturalism. In the end, despite every talent and good intention, both the movie’s time and destiny are out of joint.

‘A TIME OF DESTINY’

A Columbia Pictures/Nelson Entertainment presentation of an Alive Films production. Producer Anna Thomas. Director Gregory Nava. Script Nava, Thomas. Camera James Glennon. Production design Henry Bumstead. Music Ennio Morricone. Editor Betsy Blankett. With William Hurt, Timothy Hutton, Melissa Leo, Francisco Rabal, Concha Hidalgo.

Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG-13 (parents are strongly cautioned; some material may be inappropriate for children under 13).