A Bronx Tale

A Bronx Tale (1993)

May 13, 2005

HBO Broadcast, Somerville, MA

**** / ****

Gangster mafia movies were, are, and probably always will be prominent in the American movie scene, touchstones of our diverse and unique American experience. A Bronx Tale, Robert De Niro’s directorial debut is an excellent mafia movie because it focuses its attention not merely on face value gangster life glory, but rather on its deeply tragic human side. Within De Niro’s film there are hits and beatings and tussles and gambling and corruption and heavies and all other manner of Mafioso clichés, but all of that is mere window dressing to ideas of family, nostalgia, respect, loyalty, honor, and The American Dream that propels his film from cliché to masterpiece.

On one side of the film’s local Bronx neighborhood life, circa the early 1960s, is Sonny (Chazz Palmiteri), a rising mafia boss who thinks no one should care about The Yankees because they don’t care about you. On the other is Lorenzo (Robert DeNiro), a doting, hard-working bus driver dad who believes in honest work and being able to look at yourself in the mirror at the end of the day. They are archetypes as much as they are individuals and ring as true today as they must have in 1963. Bouncing between the two is Calogero, whom Sonny dubs ‘C.’ C is Lorenzo’s only child and through fortuitous circumstances becomes Sonny’s right hand fella at an early age. The riff between father and son, father and mob boss, and son and his own ethics is the coming-of-age story A Bronx Tale masterfully tells.

The movie is exceptional because it fills the screen with colorful characters, tips its hat to the 1960s, and shows the gradual maturity of a young man who doesn’t choose sides so much as he takes it all in and makes everything he has experienced a part of himself. The characters perfectly demonstrate how each person is the product of his family, friends, environment, and time period, sometimes losing individuality, sometimes choosing it at the most important times, ideas that often get forgotten when a good story gets the cinematic treatment. By making its characters subtly complex and the product of all their influences rather than the two-dimensional caricatures that often find their way on screen in period pieces and ethnic dramas, A Bronx Tale captures a nostalgic flare giving it a deeply personal touch that enhances every aspect of its story. Further, the film’s language doesn’t shy away from racism, political incorrectness, and prejudice. Rather, A Bronx Tale shows that often times the words we use, the actions we take, and the life we lead isn’t so much a planned course of action as it is merely following the crowd. That touching bit of complicated realism is perhaps the very best element of Chazz Palmiteri’s excellent script and a true testament to how good this film is even twelve years after its debut.

There have been many great mafia movies over the past half-century and A Bronx Tale is surely one of the best. It may not be number one in the minds of most critics, but I am sure it would be the first one any of those critics would view with their child. For a gangster movie to be a good gangster movie as well as a perfect portrait of ethnic family life in the 1960s, we have proof positive that A Bronx Tale is a film of the highest order.