NO LOOKING BACK
The plot of "No Looking Back" is deceptively simple. Charlie’s back in town. His ex-girlfriend, Claudia, is hooked up with his ‘best friend’. Charlie wants her back. His ex thought she knew what she wanted, but now that Charlie’s back, she’s not so sure.
Simple! Right?
Not really.
For starters, the most interesting character in "No Looking Back" is Claudia’s father who exerts a continuing presence in her life even though we never see him. He always breaks her mother’s heart but she loves him anyway. Claudia seems ambivalent, but professes an uncommon understanding of his behavior that baffles her sister who despises him. It all has to do with Claudia’s life before and after Charlie.
Charlie and Claudia were the ideal couple. He was the all around winner. He had looks. He was athletic. Women desired him. All his friends wanted to be like him. Claudia was intelligent and gorgeous. She got him; but most important of all, they had the same dream - to escape from their working class community, but something went wrong. Charlie left without her. Claudia put her dreams on the back burner and opted for the simple life with Michael, played with great warmth and conviction by former rocker, Jon Bon Jovi. Mike is the good guy. Charlie is not.
Writer-director, Ed Burns exudes smarmy charm as Charlie, the seductive working class "Hud" who slithers home with his unrealized dreams to reclaim some lost glory. Lauren Holly perfectly captures the complacency of a woman sleepwalking through life, until the yearnings for a life outside her sleepy seaside town are reo terms wikindled by the return of her former lover. I felt her triumph, as she came tth her mistakes before getting on with her life. I also suffered her guilt when she hurt the people who loved her most. "No Looking Back" is her story.
This might be a presumptuous thing to say, but writer-director Ed Burns just might be on his way to becoming the folk artist of working class cinema with "No Looking Back". The depictions of real people working out very real problems in the context of family and friends is a rare occurrence in films, and to make them compelling, is no small feat. Ed Burns does it here. I know these people. They inhabited the Brooklyn neighborhood where I grew up. There was more than one mother whose husband took one hike too many and for every ‘Charlie’, there was a circle of chiding friends who know their one time hero all too well. The wonder of it is that even the fully developed minor characters in "No Looking Back" are given respect and dignity, from the pizza guy to the girlfriend who wouldn’t mind having a piece of Charlie herself. They are accepted, warts and all.
"No Looking Back" is also one of the few movies I’ve seen in a long time where ‘less is more’. Burns has cut back on the wordiness I thought marred "She’s the One" and let the actions of the characters and the spatial composition of a few scenes speak volumes for them. For instance, there are two contrasting scenes in the diner where Claudia works that use an emery board and a co-worker as a symbol of a misspent life. Another particular sequence showed two people talking to each other, side by side in a car, but they were never in the same shot. You knew they were not really talking to each other, so much as talking at one another and not communicating. Whether or not, Ed Burns is working intuitively, or consciously on the formal composition of his visuals remains to be seen. Either way, "No Looking Back" is a giant leap forward in a career that started with a hope and a dream and a picture called "The Brothers McMullen."