MOVIE REVIEW : Burt Lancaster Anchors ‘Gibraltar’ Cast

In the early ‘80s, for a time, most American movies seemed to have forgotten that families existed. That’s why “Rocket Gibraltar” (selected theaters), for all its flaws and lacks, is such a heartening film.

As written by Amos Poe, directed by Daniel Petrie and acted by a large, dedicated cast, this film helps return the American family to its movie imagination. Poe, like Bergman, Altman or Ford, creates an entire family here: the multiple bonds stretching across three generations in the household of a once blacklisted old writer named Levi Blackwell (Burt Lancaster).

At the center is Lancaster’s splendid patriarch, celebrating his 77th birthday with a clan gathering that includes one son, three daughters (one an unmarried sexpot), three in-laws and a bevy of grandchildren. It’s the middle generation that behaves thoughtlessly. In charge of the party, juggling their various responsibilities, which include, implausibly, such glamorous occupations as movie producer, stand-up comic and star baseball pitcher, the adults almost ignore what might be the last dying days of their father.

Success blunts their idealism; ironically, the producer, most oblivious of all, has two sons named Orson and Kane. Although they love Levi, they love him on schedule--juggling him in between gigs.

It is the children with whom Levi communicates; to them that he confides his desire not to be buried, but cremated at sea in a glorious Viking funeral. Whether he really means this is questionable. Likely he doesn’t, since he tells it only to his grandchildren in one magically well-acted beachside scene. But the children, especially prescient young Cy Blue (Macauley Caulkin), take him at his word. They begin refurbishing a junked skiff as the “Rocket Gibraltar”: his Viking vessel, their birthday present to him.

Petrie, who succeeded Poe as director, gives the film vibrant staging. But though the movie’s running gags and character types make us laugh, we don’t get far past the surface. Poe has constructed a tragicomedy, but his writing is stronger on the comic than the tragic side. The relationships are too schematic: the adults too consistently blind, the children too agreeable and united. Why doesn’t at least one of them revolt or question their increasingly audacious plan, especially at its most crucial, terrifying point?

But this carp only explains why “Rocket Gibraltar” is no masterpiece--something which it had every chance of being. That it’s very good is inarguable.

A honeyed light seems to spill over the entire film. Sometimes, there’s an almost devotional spirit here: in the way Petrie and cameraman Jost Vacano responded to the windy Long Island setting; in the way the actors--especially John Glover, Kevin Spacey, Sinead Cusack and George Martin--meld into an ensemble. And most of all, in Burt Lancaster as Levi.

Lancaster has always excelled at two kinds of roles: the charismatic mountebank and the suffering hero or patriarch. His Levi Blackwell is a bit of both, but the traps of sentimentality are everywhere. This is the sort of role that has automatic cues for lovability: the Billie Holiday songs, the Fred Astaire dances, the seaside Viking peroration. But Lancaster takes us past all that. He gives Levi a touch of majesty, a grace and gravity, a sense of being ethereal, yet rooted to the earth.

“Rocket Gibraltar” (MPAA rated: PG) never dwells on Blackwell’s philosophy; his blacklist status is offered as a tacit badge of honor. But Lancaster gives Levi nobility anyway. This great, often underappreciated actor takes us into the marrow of mortality that sometimes exists beneath a sunny facade. He gives us a glimpse of the nobility that, mostly unseen, beats and rolls and crashes beneath a blank, endless sky.