MOVIE REVIEW : Generational Conflict in ‘Fathers, Sons’

“Fathers and Sons” (Beverly Center Cineplex) has nothing to do with Ivan Turgenev’s great 19th-Century Russian novel, and more’s the pity.

Instead, this well-meaning, lugubrious tale of generational Angst and turmoil, focuses on a modern father and son, Max and Ed Fish. Set mostly in Asbury Park on the Jersey shoreline, Bruce Springsteen territory, it’s written and directed by Paul Mones, the young filmmaker who made 1988’s art-vs.-prejudice gang fable “The Beat.” This one is clogged with symbols, too.

Mones’ movie strains at the seams for literary cachet. Protagonist Max, played by Jeff Goldblum at his most gloweringly intellectual, is a Manhattan filmmaker, father and widower turned suburban bookshop owner. One of the villains is a serial killer who distributes his own crazed vanity press literature--and is played by an actual novelist, Michael “Dizzy” Disend. The local community theater puts on an experimental adaptation of “Don Quixote,” with Max as the knight. And, when Mones wants to show communication breakdown between father and son, he snazzes it up with internal monologues: moony, ocean-inspired recitals that almost suggest a Woody Allen version of “Strange Interlude.”

The movie focuses on the troubled relationship between Max and Ed (Rory Cochrane), a silent type who’s becoming involved, through his buddy Smiley (Mitchell Marquand), with some local drug-dealing scum. But it’s structured in a way that keeps comparing Max’s life to Ed’s. Father moves through a healthy, culturally correct world of little theater, books, marathon races and flirtations. Son sinks in a teen-age wasteland of drugs and under-the-boardwalk sex, an adolescent subculture revolving around a fictitious black hallucinogenic gum called “Chew.” Father and son, we’re often reminded, aren’t dissimilar; they even gravitate toward racially mixed groups. (Joie Lee and Sam Jackson are in the “Don Quixote” troupe and, are, to put it mildly, wasted.) Why can’t they talk together?

Perhaps Mones is too infatuated with internal monologues. By the end, he has Max and Ed reading minds; there’s even a fortuneteller, played by everyone’s favorite radical sexpot, Rosanna Arquette. It’s also suggested that Max’s new life as a bookseller is cleaner, purer than movie-making. At one point, John McGinley (of Oliver Stone’s troupe) shows up at Fish’s door, excitedly announcing that he’s found the money to produce a script Max wrote ten years ago, and Max turns him down--because he doesn’t like the person he used to be when he was directing films.

“Fathers and Sons” has the same general theme as Robert Redford’s fine adaptation of Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It”--generational and cultural conflict among men--but, ironically, this low-budget labor-of-love, shot for about $1 million, seems more compromised by movie cliches than the mainstream “River.” Should Mones really have tried to make this low-key mood and relationship piece and then thrown in drug deals, gun play and a serial killer?

“Fathers and Sons” (MPAA rated R for violence, sensuality and drug content) has a rich core notion. Everything Ed is going through mirrors Max’s ‘60s past--and he’s too concerned with being a nonjudgmental parent to lay down the law. There’s great comic-dramatic potential there, but Mones misses most of it; he may be one more example of a director too stuck on his own writing, someone who needs a script collaborator. Every once in a while, there’s an affecting scene: Max and Ed reaching out. Or a funny one: Ellen Green, who plays Dulcinella in the local “Quixote,” does a brilliantly observed car-seat sex tease. But mostly “Fathers and Son” makes you wish you were reading Turgenev instead.

‘Fathers and Sons’

Jeff Goldblum: Max Fish

Rory Cochrane: Ed Fish

Mitchell Marquand: Smiley

Famke Janssen: Kyle

A Pacific Pictures release of a Jon Kilik production. Director/Screenplay Paul Mones. Producer Jon Kilik. Executive producers Nick Weschler, Keith Addis. Cinematographer Ron Fortunato. Editor Janice Keuhnelian. Music Mason Darling. Production design Eve Cauley. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (language, sensuality, drug content and some violence).