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22 march 9, 2012 | the boston phoenix | Thephoenix.com
Dave Rentauskas
Welcome to Suck City
Boston author Nick Flynn talks about the new movie based on his memoir and how his dad felt about being played by Robert De Niro
_By Th o m a s Pa g e M c Bee
Plenty of books are turned into movies, but Scituateborn PEN-award winning poet, memoirist, and playwright Nick Flynn has had the slightly less usual experience, based on his book Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, of
seeing his own life and that of his father — an alcoholic and
petty criminal who disappeared from
the family’s life until Flynn encountered
him again while working at a Boston
homeless shelter —translated to the
screen. In fact, at this point, he’s writing
yet another memoir about the process of
making the film. Flynn spoke to me by
phone from New York City about fathers
and sons, seeing De Niro play his dad,
and Boston’s dark sense of humor.
f
struck; he was assuming Robert De Niro was star struck to
see him. So he sort of just held forth. He gave De Niro like an
“Okay, I’ll let you. . . .” and he just told stories about himself.
And then De Niro wanted to be able to ramble on like that, to
have these long monologues that seemed to keep my father
afloat.
“[My father] was a
little disappointed
that we showed up
with De Niro; it’s
a little like ‘Oh,
well, I guess he’ll
do, but he wasn’t
my first choice.’ ”
What did you think about seeing
your parents re-created on screen,
particularly by famous celebrities? I
don’t even think of De Niro as a movie
star, I just think of him as our best actor.
After he met my father — my father sort
of rambled on for like two hours and
didn’t really give a fuck that Robert De
Niro was about to play him, ’cause he just
wanted to talk about himself. So yeah, he
was actually a little disappointed because he’s been casting
the movie of his life for years. He had Dustin Hoffman cast
to play him, so he was a little pissed. But he cast it back in
the ’70s. So, he was a little disappointed that we showed up
with De Niro; it’s a little like “Oh, well, I guess he’ll do, but he
wasn’t my first choice.” [My father] was the opposite of star
Has your father seen the movie? I showed
him the preview of the movie about 20
times in a row, and he was very taken.
The first thing he was taken by was when
Paul Dano gets punched in the eye. He
really liked that a lot. And then he was
sort of taken by when De Niro is in bed
and saying, “You are mine, I made you.”
Then he started imitating De Niro saying
it, and saying what a great voice, and
then he started saying it — he was sort of
imitating De Niro imitating himself.
That sounds really meta. Yeah, it was
very strange. So then we ended up
watching it [the trailer] like 20 times,
and he kept stopping it, “Listen to his
voice! That’s great.”
It must feel a step removed to make a memoir into a film,
or just a different beast entirely. For me, it seemed like
for years on end it seemed dead in the water, like this is
never going to get made. And then we started to go into
pre-production and looking into locations, and I’m getting
e-mails of De Niro in, like, 50 different coats, and having to
decide what coat would be worn by my father or captures
some message. . . . . There’s this crazy frenzy, but then
the moment when De Niro opens his mouth and says the
words, then something utterly unexpected happens. I guess
this is why actors get paid so much money — it’s something
that you can’t even decide. It’s just this moment when all
that work is embodied in this one moment. And it’s tiring.
That’s the moment when all this emotion is released, it’s
released at that moment. And we’ve all felt that in films
before, films we love, that’s what happens. But the first
time, the first take of the first scene, you realize that you’re
in the middle of something unprecedented.
The film also was successful in calling attention to the
human reality of homelessness. When Paul Dano and I
first signed on together, if there was one request I had it
was to not stereotype the homeless. And Paul was quite
game about that. You know the scene at the ATM where
the guy is banging on the door saying, “Kill the homeless
faggots”? That happened to Paul and I. We were in South
Boston, and it was a freezing cold night. It was probably
five degrees, and we had just come from a place in Southie
by the railroad tracks [where] a homeless guy had been
beaten to death with baseball bats, like, two weeks ago.
And we were in this ATM, sitting on the floor with this
homeless guy, and Paul and I are just wearing coats
we had taken from the shelter, because we didn’t dress
adequately for the five degrees. So we’re in these really
big, sort of ratty coats and we’re on the floor with this guy,
and these kids come up and banged on the door and said,
“Kill all the homeless faggots.” There’s no one around,
the van is parked two blocks away, and there’s like one
thephoenix.com | the boston phoenix | March 9, 2012 23
I’ve often wondered about that myself, when I see
homeless people in Boston. How in the world do people
survive the winters? Yeah, and my father was there. He
did survive in the ’50s and the ’60s. Sometimes he was
just in a shelter, but there were long stretches where
he was just sleeping outside, when he got barred from
the shelters. Every winter he was sleeping out in the
snow. It’s pretty rough in Boston. It would snow, and
then people would beat on you. It’s not easy. And it’s
not always kids. Sometime the homeless people would
do it too, or the cops. Or you’re just killing yourself with
whatever. So yeah, it’s a rough thing.
I mean, we don’t want to call this “the homeless
alcoholic movie,” or else people would keep away from it
in droves, so it’s better to sort of think about it as a fatherson thing. But this it it, this is where it’s located, and
I really respect Focus for taking it on and being willing
to go with it and not trying to water it down. It is about
someone struggling in a low moment in their life, it’s sort
of about the situation and how they find themselves in it
and how they find their way out of it. But don’t give it the
headline, “The Homeless Alcoholic Movie.”
I was going to go with that, but OKAY. Feel-good homeless
alcoholic movie of the year.
Did people from Pine Street like the book? If you work there,
even if you worked there now, I think it captures some of
the — you know, when I read the book in Boston, people
get it as a comedy, as like a dark comedy. But if I read it
in the Midwest, people think it’s a tragedy. Boston, you
know, it’s a pretty sick town, so people get that humor.
Working at the shelter was about the darkly comic, along
with tragedy, but there’s always this comedy running
underneath it. And I tried to capture that in the book, and I
think Paul, he also has this strange lightness in the midst
of this tragedy. If I see a movie that is just too dark, I don’t
believe it. It doesn’t seem like life to me. Usually in your
darkest moments is your opportunity of light.
I understand that you’re writing a third book now, is
that right? That it is a part of a trilogy that includes
these other two [Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and
The Ticking is the Bomb]? Yeah, I’m writing a book about
the making of the movie. It was kind of strange being
on set and watching it the whole time. It’s called The
Reenactments. All the books sort of have a mother and
father. But now, in this one, my mother and father
have sort of been dissolved into film. There are actors
portraying them now.
So WRITING THE BOOK will be like interacting with the
ghosts of your parents through MAKING the film? I
don’t know if I believe in catharsis, but when you see
something reenacted — I’m reading about neurobiologists
these days, and about [Vilayanur S.] Ramachandran and
the mirrored box that he uses in cases where you’ve had
a limb amputated. He puts them in this mirrored box,
and it appears to their brain that they are whole again.
The whole is the side with the limb missing, and that
allows — that relieves them of their phantom-pain issue.
Once they see their body whole again, they can then
release the pain. And that just seems like some sort of as
perfect metaphor for making the film.
that’s beautiful. Before you go: why not Another
Bullshit Night In Suck City for the film title? There was
never a chance that it was going to be called Another
Bullshit Night in Suck City. I guess in America you can’t do
that. I guess that’s the way it is. We called it Welcome to
Suck City in a screening in New Jersey over the summer.
When they [potential viewers] heard Suck City, they just
turned and walked away. But if you took them aside
and say Robert De Niro is in it, then everyone would
go. So it was a big mistake with the Suck City thing.
Unfortunately, no one would say “Hey, want to go to Suck
City tonight with me?” Only people in Boston would go.
But again, like I said, it’s a sick city.
I think most people in Boston would definitely go
to something called Suck City. Yeah, I know, but
that’s Boston. ^
Father complex
Being Flynn is no bum deal
_BY THOMAS PAGE McBEE
XXXW
BEING FLYNN
DIRECTED BY PAUL WEITZ | WRITTEN BY PAUL
WEITZ BASED ON ANOTHER BULLSHIT NIGHT IN
SUCK CITY BY NICK FLYNN | WITH PAUL DANO,
ROBERT DE NIRO, OLIVIA THIRLBY, AND JULIANNE
MOORE | FOCUS FEATURES | 102 MINUTES
KENDALL SQUARE
If you’re a fan of Nick Flynn’s stunning 2004
memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,
you’re probably concerned about whether
Being Flynn director Paul Weitz will do justice
to Flynn’s exploration of grief, homelessness,
and father-son relationships on the streets
of ’80s-era Boston. Adaptations are always
difficult to pull off, but this one had the extra
baggage of being based on a lyrical book with
chapter titles like “The Piss of God,” and a
tendency to jump back and forth through
time as Flynn unpacks his life story.
And what a story it is: an absent, alcoholic,
self-aggrandizing father, Jonathan, whom Nick
hardly knows, arrives as a “guest” at the Pine
Street Inn, the Boston homeless shelter where
Nick works alongside outcasts barely holding it together themselves. The book’s about
the hardest kind of love — the love between
failed parents and their adult children — and it
explores its difficult themes with a haunting vision that doesn’t stray into sentimentality.
And, against all odds, the movie does, too.
The film opts for a more linear structure
(with some flashbacks), but that doesn’t
stop Weitz from editing scenes together
thematically, in imitation of Another Night’s
style. Weitz’s ear for this is pitch-perfect, particularly when it comes to the main tension
of the story: is Flynn destined to turn out like
his old man? Near the opening, we see them
both — Jonathan (Robert De Niro) in the junkfilled apartment that he’s about to be evicted
from, and Nick (Paul Dano) in his soon-to-be-
FAMILY VALUES Son Nick (Paul Dano) and father Jonathan (Robert De Niro)
reconnect at a Boston homeless shelter.
ex’s apartment — each of them writing, daydrinking, and writing some more. In an instant
what’s at stake is conveyed: the two men are
separated by age and not much more.
Dano’s Nick is initially young and cocky,
and the least-believable scenes depict him as
a half-drunk ladies’ man — smashing his head
into a girl’s bathroom mirror in shame, then
hitting on Denise (the out-of-it Olivia Thirlby),
the new girl he’s into who gets him the job at
the Inn, with a sleazy, self-obsessed smoothness that she seems too smart to fall for. Then
again, all of his co-workers at Pine Street are
half-cocked, and watching their relationships
unfold — with each other and with the men in
their charge — is darkly funny, touching stuff.
Interestingly, Nick’s choice to work at
the shelter catalyzes his departure from his
father’s path, but also reconnects them. And
the movie flies once Jonathan shows up at Pine
Street’s door. Though Paul Dano does a fine job
as Nick, and Julianne Moore turns in a strong
performance as Nick’s downward-spiraling-yetloving mom, it’s De Niro who hits it out of the
park. His Jonathan is racist, selfish, narcissistic,
and — somehow — incredibly sympathetic.
Jonathan, a failed writer, mixes prejudice
and conceit with moments of vulnerability that
are windows into his pride. When he arrives at
Pine Street, he tells Nick that they should both,
as writers, be gathering material at the shelter.
“It’s a great opportunity for me to see how the
other half lives: the poor, the downtrodden,”
he says. The depth of his denial dumbfounds
Nick — and the viewer — but as he falls deeper
into drunken, hallucinatory despair, we see in
De Niro’s long looks in the mirror and slouching
frame how aware he is of his own true colors.
This may be his best performance in decades.
Nick, meanwhile, struggles with his own
demons: his mother’s suicide, his addiction,
and his fear of who he’s becoming. The way
father and son’s stories ultimately twin is
surprising and poignant. Jonathan’s wisdom
and Nick’s compassion are the gifts their relationship gives them, and the film honors the
dignity of these two misfits in an adaptation
that’s a work of art all its own. ^
The working homeless
For Cherie King, paid employment doesn’t bring shelter
f
Cherie King, 36, has been living in and out of shelters since Au- Can you explain what it’s like to spend a night in a
gust 13, 2011. She’s homeless because she dropped everything
shelter? [Recently] I arrived at a city-run shelter after 9 pm, which was
to care for her mentally ill brother and bedridden
lights out. I had to go through a metal detector, and
mother, the latter of whom died last year. In
they made me throw out unopened canned foods. I
her work as a homeless advocate with Occupy
was given a top bunk and had to put everything I had
Boston, King has made it a point to bring light
in my bed. I went to the bathroom, and the toilet seat
to her story, and to those of more than 1000
was so burnt up from putting cigarettes out on it that
other Boston adults who are in the same preat first I thought someone had a mess. I was so nerdicament. She’s also quick to dispel homeless
vous that I barely slept — I was afraid that someone
stereotypes: King doesn’t drink or use drugs,
would steal my stuff. Wake-up is at 5:30 am, and you
and she works as many part-time jobs as she
have to be out of the dorm by 7 am.
can land. According to a 2011 survey by the US
why is having some sort of technology
Department of Mayors, Boston’s homelessness
so important for the homeless popularate is in moderate decline. Still, the plight of
HARD WORK Multiple parttion in Boston? I had a laptop stolen from me
the working, struggling people on the street
time jobs haven’t saved
in November. Since then, I was given a replacement,
remains a real one.
Cherie King from homelessand have online access through friends or public
ness.
According to past surveys, only about
WiFi. Every homeless person should have equal ac30 percent of the homeless population
cess to the Internet and cell phone services. People
in Boston is female. What makes it especially hard to be
don’t realize that without a phone or access to one, you kind of fall
a woman on the street? There are not enough beds for women
off the face of earth. Many people who are homeless have no family
in any shelters. At the same time, there are less services to help men. I
to turn to, whether the fault is theirs or not. It’s up to us to reach out
came across a single father of a 12-year-old boy; the mother, who is also to those people and help them get out of a bad situation. We can do
homeless, is out of the picture totally. There are very few services are
it, if we have a heart.
out there to help this man keep his child.
_Chris Faraone
Chris Faraon e
person in there. And Paul sort of got it in that moment,
the vulnerability of someone being on the streets. This
sort of visceral terror. And we ended up putting it in the
movie. It’s not really in the book, but that’s from Paul
and I on our own on the streets.