Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

Flawed father and trans-inclined son

An imprisoned husband and father, released after three years, finds an emotionally shifting new world upon his return home in the urban family drama Gun Hill Road.

An imprisoned husband and father, released after three years, finds an emotionally shifting new world upon his return home in the urban family drama

Gun Hill Road.

Set in a struggling yet tightly knit Puerto Rican community in the Bronx, writer-director Rashaad Ernesto Green's debut feature stars Esai Morales as Enrique, a hardened parolee who averts his eyes when making love to his wife, Angela (Judy Reyes), who had an affair while he was gone. But he can only stare in confused, wounded anger at his transsexually inclined teenage son Michael (Harmony Santana) and worry for how it reflects on his own masculinity.

Before some predictable, freedom-threatening recidivism on Enrique's part, the film exhibits a simultaneously anthropological and sensitive interest in Michael's day-to-day life: how he taps into his self-confidence dressing as a woman, endures his dad's pointless attempts to butch him up, and negotiates a fraught relationship with a transsexual-curious African American boyfriend.

Although Green's sense of narrative conflict leads inexorably into clichéd parent-child-showdown territory, the quietly commanding turn by newcomer Santana - whose outward embrace of an already well-internalized transformation leaps off the screen with equal parts joy, melancholia, and bravery - is a standout.

Gun Hill Road ** (out of four stars)

Written and directed by Rashaad Ernesto Green. With Esai Morales, Judy Reyes, Felix Solis, and Harmony Santana. Distributed

by Motion Film Group.

Running time: 1 hours, 28 mins.

Parent's guide: R (strong sexual content, profanity, some violence)

Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse

EndText