Be a Man

La Mission

Directed by Peter Bratt

Runtime: 117 min.

Handsome Harry

Directed by Bette Gordon

[At IFC Center ]

Runtime: 94 min.

MORRISSEY RECENTLY MUSED: “Design if you can/ The way to just to be a man.”That wonderment defines both La Mission and Handsome Harry, two new movies that dismantle social myths about masculinity. In La Mission, Che Rivera (Benjamin Bratt), a resident of San Fran’s largely Chicano Mission district, is a former gangbanger raising his son (Jeremy Ray Valdez) in ethnic tradition: courteous, clean, proud, loyal and strong. Machismo itself is questioned when Che can’t accept his son’s gayness. Writer-director Peter Bratt places Che at the center of a multiethnic community that illustrates how pervasive and entranced are notions of masculinity.

Che’s growth and salvation come from his difficult, personal challenge to find openness (heart) within his fierce, unquestioned ideology. Just as he designs low-rider cars expressing his cultural solidarity, Che has to widen his ideas of fatherhood and maleness. La Mission continues the Bratt brothers’ effort to design cinematic guides to contemporary ethnic male experience—usually through Benjamin’s actorly daring to play and reveal badass—itself a barrio cliché. Instead of achieving the depth of De Niro’s A Bronx Tale soulfulness, he falls into Denzel-handsome facility. Che’s hope comes from romantic sentiments—fiercely represented in well-selected ’70s R&B that authentically constitutes an O.G.’s nostalgic faith.That’s the best thing about La Mission.

The best thing about Handsome Harry is its anachronistic concern with guilt. Harry Sweeney (Jamey Sheridan, an actor once lauded for his snark) is a Vietnam vet whose masculine good nature covers up his inner torment until a friend’s death forces him to bring his guilt and the full extent of his humanity out of the closet. Fools will call that a spoiler, but unless we’ve lost appreciation for the art of cinema to move us by recognition of our common concern, the remarkable depth of Sheridan’s performance will be a revelation for anyone who seeks out Handsome Harry.

Sheridan’s Harry gives a complex, more accurate measure of how one man deludes others as a way of protecting himself. While Handsome Harry’s story is obvious—borrowing familiar road movie tropes—it roughly sketches sensitive points of self-acceptance in the way Harry and his navy buddies blot out their youth or wince at its memories. As middle-aged men, they don’t lament lost innocence but the principles and friendships they allowed themselves to betray.

This sense of regret is neither common nor popular in modern, youth-oriented film culture; there’s a lost-cause quality in Harry’s valiant journey to face the people he feels he disgraced. Sheridan embraces Harry’s obligation as his own artistic mission and that fervor can also be felt in Steve Buscemi, John Savage, Aidan Quinn and Titus Welliver, who’ve all aged past youthful narcissism.These actors show vulnerability in their physicality with each other and their complex relations to women.Their different levels of bonhomie recall the insight of Bob Rafelson’s 1970s films as well as a post-Cassavetes sense of exposure—but with a different acceptance of male openness that, like La Mission, reflects a changed perspective on masculine behavior.

Director Bette Gordon presents the actors’ sensitivity with tactful insight and appreciation reminiscent of Katherine Dieckmann’s very fine Diggers. Gordon doesn’t indulge peacocking like George Clooney’s directors; she provides a context for rethinking masculinity that connects with the actors’ candidness. This is best seen in the divorced Harry’s fond distance with his son and a charming ironic moment when Harry and a female conquest (Mariann Mayberry) discover a common past and sing. Sheridan’s performance is meant to be a breakthrough and these scenes that take him beyond the sharp-eyed sass of his TV work fulfill that aim.

Sheridan’s bloom into Harry’s self-acceptance makes Handsome Harry especially poignant as an ought-to-be love story.

It makes a perfect double-bill with Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s recent Easier With Practice, which observed the ways young men delude themselves, and Sheridan clarifies similar complications—especially when Harry meets his former shipmate and best friend (Campbell Scott), to whom he smiles incessantly.That mix of chagrin and tenderness, the need for forgiveness, is ardent but also remarkably forthcoming.