Amongst Friends (1993) – DVD

½*/**** Image A Sound A
starring Steve Parlavecchio, Joseph Lindsey, Patrick McGaw, Mira Sorvino
written and directed by Rob Weiss

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In 1973, Martin Scorsese made Mean Streets, a film that related the agony of someone with actual problems: Scorsese had lived in a world where the only way out of becoming a victim was to be a gangster or a priest; his inability to accept the wasting of himself and the people he knew gave his film infinite potency. Exactly twenty years later came Rob Weiss's Amongst Friends, in which a bunch of spoiled Long Island kids opt for crime out of boredom and lack of imagination–it's about people who stupidly want to have Scorsese's hellish problems, and it's about as thought through as its protagonists' boneheaded dreams. Unable to get past post-Scorsese gangster chic, the movie's shallow ineptitude is painful reminder that imitation is the sincerest form of incomprehension.

Poetry does not come easy to Rob Weiss, as evidenced by his opening voiceover: the narrator relates how his cherry was popped at age twelve by a twenty-year-old woman who complained of his coming too soon. "She was right," he says, "it went too fast–but then, what doesn't?" This is the level of insight that drives Weiss's wholly undifferentiated trio of privileged high school buddies (Steve Parlavecchio, Joseph Lindsey, and Patrick McGaw), whose macho fantasies find them opting for crime instead of college. One almost immediately gets pinched in a drug bust and serves two years, while the other two scheme, fail to get anywhere, then mastermind a heist on a Jewish gangster (David Stepkin) that for no apparent reason gets them on the gangster's payroll. Everything will unravel, of course, as two of the three bicker over a mutual love and bullets fly.

And that's it. For all its disillusioned stay-in-school-kids blather, Amongst Friends is in love with the pain and failure that are the crime movie's stock-in-trade: its laying low of kids who want to be gangsters is in itself a pose by a kid who wants to be a gangster. The tragic dimensions only lend it the gravitas that makes a gangster cool, and that gets dumb rich kids thinking they've faced the grim truth of it all. In reality, they've only wrapped their fantasy in a fantasy–and not a very good one, at that: Weiss's tin ear for dialogue is matched by his stumblebum mise-en-scène, most hilariously in a robbery that makes the climactic raid in Bottle Rocket look like the work of Danny Ocean himself.

There's nothing wrong with a crime fantasy as long as you recognize that it's a fantasy. Tarantino won his fame with his brilliance for abstracting the theme of work into style to facilitate his masochistic fantasies, but nobody goes to Tarantino for documentary realism–the thing Amongst Friends so desperately aspires to, unaware that its obnoxious array of interchangeable mooks are not made more dashing simply for using the word "fuck." The only original and creative things about it are the psychedelic Bill Cosby sweaters worn by the Jewish mobster and the soothing presence of Mira Sorvino as the fought-over girlfriend, and they're too little, too late in a film driven by empty ambition and bankrupt intelligence. It huffs, it puffs, it uses profanity, but in the end the only place Amongst Friends finds itself is amongst amateurs.

THE DVD
New Line gives Amongst Friends a far better DVD presentation than it deserves. The 1.85:1, 16×9-enhanced image is remarkably sharp considering the gummy nature of the source colours: the softened shapes and hues seem deep and Van Sant-esque, provided you can forget their unimaginative deployment. The studio also sprang for Dolby and DTS 5.1 soundmixes, for reasons that are entirely unclear. Both tracks are absurdly rich, and while the rear channels are mostly used for ambient noise, the fronts ricochet with voices and effects enhanced by the unusual clarity. The Dolby option actually has a slight edge, as the DTS tends to blend the sounds instead of isolating them, though it's really an academic question. This film's trailer, trailers for Kansas City, Dinner Rush, and Knockaround Guys, and a New Line weblink round out the package.

88 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English DTS 5.1, English Dolby Surround; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; New Line