Movie Reviews : A Rebellious Son Returns Home in ‘Tiger Warsaw’

“Tiger Warsaw” (citywide) is a movie that not only dares to pose the question “Is it true you can’t go home again?” but dares to have its title character pose it, early on, for our benefit. From the heart-tugging strings and woodwinds on the sound track, it’s a safe bet that the answer in this sleepy, well-meaning melodrama of reconciliation will be a big, sloppy yep .

Patrick Swayze is the prodigal son and title rebel here, hoping to be welcomed back into the family fold after an absence of a decade and a half. With his beard, bangs and black jacket, and the souped-up, decal-drenched Plymouth he revs back into his old hometown, Swayze looks a rather antiquated anti-hero, as if he’d been frozen in time since he split back in 1971. You half-expect his big, dark secret to be that he left his Polish-American family and Pennsylvania factory town to dodge the draft.

Instead, it turns out that he’d taken up a weapon against his own father in a dimly remembered fight, and no one in the Warsaw clan has forgiven him in the 15 years since--except his saintly, long-suffering mother (an impossibly young and aglow Piper Laurie). So when our outcast finally shows up at the old homestead just as his sister is about to get hitched, he’s as welcome a sight in town as Marvin Mitchelson.

As Warsaw, Swayze broods, but benignly. The only dangerous thing about him is his tendency toward sentimentality; he’d like nothing more than to reminisce with old high school buddies. Family and friends are less enthralled than Swayze’s “Dirty Dancing” fans might be, however. Instead of breaking out old Contours records, they show their welcome by buying rifles, getting restraining orders and hiring motorcycle gangs to scare him back out of town.

Forgiveness is long in coming in Roy London’s script, but it inevitability does. “Why wait until the funeral to wish we’d done better for each other?” Mrs. Warsaw finally ask the other family members, as if quoting from the collected works of Ann Landers.

“Tiger Warsaw” is, indeed, paced like a funeral by director-producer Amin Chaudhri, whose long takes under sumptuously filmed natural lighting often come to resemble still photographs. Neither Chaudhri’s direction nor London’s screenplay do any favors for Swayze’s rising career. In one scene, his character is called on to be a tortured soul pondering suicide, and in the next, he’s admirably well-adjusted and warm; it averages out to a look of bewilderment on Swayze’s face.

Yet Lee Richardson, as the father, very nearly resuscitates the scenes he’s in, with a rich performance that injects quiet urgency into the predictable familial dispute. Richardson does a quiet, heroic job of reinforcing that this patriarch is as deeply haunted as he is bitter--as in a brief, lovely scene where the senior Warsaw sleepily confesses to his wife of many decades that he’s afraid of the dark.

If only “Tiger Warsaw” (MPAA-rated R for language, brief nudity and drug use) gave its screen-dominating Swayze similarly telling quirks of personality, instead of just a hot-rod, greasy bangs and a good nature.