Sidewalks of New York (2001) – DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound C+ Extras B+
starring Edward Burns, Rosario Dawson, Heather Graham, Dennis Farina
written and directed by Edward Burns

by Walter Chaw Sort of a Neil LaBute film without the misanthropic conviction or a Woody Allen film without the self-loathing wit (more precisely, Allen’s Husbands and Wives without its self-loathing wit), Sidewalks of New York is the latest instalment in Edward Burns’s ongoing mission to promote himself as a sensitive new age guy deserving of your trust. It’s probably most efficient to just call Sidewalks of New York the second time (after She’s the One) that writer-director-star Burns has tried to remake his 1995 micro-budgeted Sundance cause célèbre, The Brothers McMullen. (His third film, No Looking Back, was a detour into Cassavetes territory.)

There are no brothers this time around but Burns’s tedious self-aggrandizing and disingenuous proclamations of wholesomeness lingers. He actually goes so far as to ascribe some kind of moral barometer to the number of sexual partners a person has: five or less and you’re a saintly naïf; twenty or more and you’re hellbound scum; over five-hundred and you’re Dennis Farina’s hilarious Carpo cameo. It’s possible for a director to blend deep-rooted Catholic sex-guilt into films without the work being odious and obvious (see: Martin Scorsese), but Burns hasn’t quite got the knack. At one point, the six roundelay characters of Sidewalks of New York boil down their collective problem in an Allen-esque fourth wall-breaking scenario: “Why are we so fucked up? Love or sex?” Ah, Ed, if only it were that simple for those of us not similarly tortured by the prospect of kissing Mary’s lips.

Tommy Riley (Burns) is a television producer and the prototypical Burns protagonist: studly, impossibly desirable to supermodels and starlets, and pure as the driven snow. The conflict in Burns’s films is entirely embedded in the non-Burns characters. True to form, the magnificent Stanley Tucci plays a variation on his Daytrippers persona, an adulterous white-collar sleazebag who is brought so low that even an inch or two is slandered from his member. Brittany Murphy is ebullient in the only role that she ever plays: emotionally shattered bimbo Lolita; her nebbishy inamorata Ben (David Krumholtz)–far less sexually experienced, of course–is the perfect vehicle for salvation of the fallen Magdalene with the heart of gold. Tucci’s wife is played with carefully positioned misunderstanding by poor, stunned Heather Graham, and Rosario Dawson has the thankless task of loving and losing Tommy. At least she leaves with his child, Burns’s idea of an empowering booby prize for the aspiring feminist. (Ms. Dawson, of course, if gifted with the most hollow and insulting of several exit apologias, hers having something to do with the nobility of choosing life against the odds.) The delightful romantic miscalculations culminate in the vanilla comeuppance for the deserving (read: most promiscuous), while the nobly unsullied (Burns/Graham, Murphy/Krumholtz, Dawson and child) ride off into a now-mythical Manhattan sunset to the strains of a jaunty Cake tune.

Shaky hand-held camera, disorienting and badly timed zooms and whip-pans, and weird first-person interviews with the principles post-coitus or in a series of canned “lunchtime polls” lifted straight from Heathers all combine in Burns’s slipshod homage to remind of just how good Woody Allen used to be at examining his issues through the malleable celluloid medium. Alas, besides already being a humdrum Husbands and Wives, Sidewalks of New York is instantly a little worn around the edges, pushed back as it was from a September release by the atrocity at the World Trade Center. The Twin Towers loom in the background of several shots, ironic counterpoint of the cruellest kind to just how dated Burns’s gender politics are, how far past the carton date Burns himself has expired as a hyphenate of odes to his own lack of controversy.

Still, the film is not without a proficient moment or two–all of them attributable to Stanley Tucci’s typically above-reproach performance. The man is so natural it’s awe-inspiring; here he animates Burns’s awkward and stagnant patter into something resembling artless grace. The best choice that Burns makes in Sidewalks of New York is to avoid acting in any scenes with Tucci–but no one ever said that Burns didn’t know how to make himself look good. Originally published: November 30, 2001.

THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Damn you, Edward Burns: you make such unbearable movies but record such wonderful commentary tracks for them that I actually looked forward to the Sidewalks of New York DVD. Once again, Burns, with a minimum of artistic posturing and self-aggrandizement, breaks independent filmmaking down to its nuts and bolts for us in his feature-length yakker for Sidewalks of New York, offering advice practical (Chinese lanterns light interiors quickly, efficiently, and cheaply) and theoretical (the less time a part requires of an actor the more likely they are to accept it) and shocking us with details that ought to make a lot of big-budget filmmakers lose sleep. That Dennis Farina, for instance, who appears in several scenes throughout the film, was on set for less than a day.

No question about it: Burns runs a tight ship; Sidewalks of New York did not even come to a million dollars before P&A (prints and advertising). Paramount’s DVD presents a dim but clear 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer of the 35mm production with Dolby Surround sound you’ll either want to crank up or appreciate for its tendency to mute the dialogue. A 22-minute Sundance Channel “Anatomy of a Scene” special, which covers in some logistical depth the first video store encounter between Burns’s and Dawson’s characters from the complementary points of view of the actors, the location manager, the cinematographer, the producer, and the editor, rounds out the disc.

107 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English Dolby Surround; CC; English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Paramount