MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Jumpin’ a Spiritual Odyssey in the Bronx

British actor Tim Roth is a whiz at scenes of emotional dislocation. As Vincent van Gogh in Robert Altman’s “Vincent & Theo,” Roth spent most of the movie coming apart and in “Jumpin at the Boneyard” (AMC Century 14) he’s at it again--with a near-perfect Bronx accent. As Manny, who has recently gone through a bad divorce, Roth starts out at peak pitch and goes on from there. It’s an exhausting performance but it’s stoked with real rage. He keeps you watching the movie by sheer force of personality.

Manny’s crackhead brother Dan (Alexis Arquette), looking for something to feed his habit, breaks into Manny’s apartment at the start of the film. They haven’t seen each other in three years. After slapping Dan around while his addict girlfriend Jeanette (Dinitra Vance) watches, Manny hauls his brother to their father’s grave, and then back to the Bronx neighborhood where they grew up. It gradually becomes clear that Manny is trying to achieve salvation by retracing his childhood steps; he wants to rescue Dan as a way of rescuing himself.

Writer-director Jeff Stanzler doesn’t overdo the symbolism but the film still has its overemphatic, Cassavetes-ish side. It’s too obviously a spiritual odyssey. (The action takes place in a 15-hour span.) Part of the problem is that Roth is so much more powerful an actor than Arquette that their confabs are lopsided; the bond between them never really coheres.

Roth carries most of the scenes by expertly modulating his responses; he’s a live wire with an alternating current. His best scenes are not with Arquette but with a few of the other actors, like Sam Jackson, who plays a youth-center director to whom Manny turns for help, or with Elizabeth Bracco, who plays Manny’s enraged ex-wife. These scenes have a real kick because they give Roth something to work against. They bring out his animus.

This is Stanzler’s first feature, and he shows some talent for scenes of kicky despair. The sequences where Manny and Dan return to their old tenement, now located in a black neighborhood, have a forlorn creepiness. The brothers are like interlopers in their own reverie. The cinematography by Lloyd Goldfine is unusually crisp and eloquent; it gives the reverie a bright, eerie starkness. The film (rated R for language) occasionally puts across the horror of being an addict at large in a big soul-crunching city, and that’s no small accomplishment. What it doesn’t put across is a larger reason for watching all this dreary agonizing.

‘Jumpin at the Boneyard’

Tim Roth: Manny

Alexis Arquette: Dan

Dinitra Vance: Jeanette

A Kasdan Pictures presentation, released by 20th Century Fox. Director Jeff Stanzler. Producer Nina R. Sadowsky & Lloyd Goldfine. Executive producer Lawrence Kasdan. Screenplay by Jeff Stanzler. Cinematographer Lloyd Goldfine. Editor Christopher Tellefsen. Costumes Natasha Landau. Music Steve Postel. Production design Caroline Wallner. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (language).

20th Century Fox