La Mission

It doesn’t help that Benjamin’s performance as a widowed bus driver and old-school neighborhood guy rings with false bravado and seemingly arbitrary shifts from glad-handing charmer to temperamental jerk. Still living in the same apartment building that’s passed through his family for decades, Bratt survived a jail stint and a bout with alcoholism, and raised a high-school-aged son (Jeremy Ray Valdez) who gets good grades and stays out of trouble. But when he sees Polaroids of his son in a nightclub with his boyfriend, Bratt unleashes a torrent of verbal and physical abuse and kicks Valdez to the curb. Several intermediaries, most notably an attractive single renter (Erika Alexander), try to talk Bratt off the ledge, but his inner Archie Bunker proves resilient.

Shot on location by veteran cinematographer Hiro Narita (Never Cry Wolf), La Mission succeeds to some degree in capturing the spirit and rituals of the neighborhood, and how it has and hasn’t changed, for better or for worse. But the script is so TV-movie programmatic—and at nearly two hours, absurdly slow about hitting its marks—that the vitality of the setting doesn’t seep through. Bratt’s character is stuck in old ways of thinking, and the movie, for all its well-meaning social intent, is right there with him.

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