Unlike the rap group Young Black Teenagers, which had no black members, the film White Irish Drinkers is not titled ironically; writer/director John Gray's Brooklyn-based, 1975-set film teems with characters who are in fact white, Irish and drinkers. And, as you might have guessed from its title, Drinkers is as full of cheap sentimentality and predictable behavior as a Hell's Kitchen bar would have been in the 1970s.
The movie tells the story of the Leary brothers: dreamer and sensitive young artist Brian (Nick Thurston) and his thug-life-in-the-making, callus-fisted older brother Danny (Geoff Wigdor, who, coincidentally, resembles the pugnacious DJ Skribble of YBT). Their angry, woozy father Paddy (Stephen Lang) is the kind of two-fisted guzzler who probably smells like he has the same blood type as the Johnnie Walker clan -- which leads him to beat the sweat off the bad-egg Danny. Their mom (Karen Allen) wears her misery like a shroud; you can almost hear the strains of Isaac Hayes' cakey melodramatic melody, "One Big, Unhappy Family."
What Gray has going for him is a young and eager cast -- particularly Wigdor, who works so intensely you can see the energy pulsing at his temples. The younger actors almost break through the obviousness of the material -- the neighborhood and all the rest of the stuff Richard Price cribbed from the movies for his novels -- which swaddles them so tightly it feels like bondage gear. The inevitability of it all seems almost fetishistic, the kind of thing some paying customer would submit to.
Gray throws in a handful of offbeat set pieces that have the effect of making you wish they were in a better movie. In one, Brian seizes an opportunity to impress Shauna (Leslie Murphy) at a neighborhood bar by drawing a portrait of her in the dirty bar window with his fingers. If the entire bar hadn't burst into applause at Brian's accomplishment, Drinkers might feel like it was going somewhere -- as Brian is so desperate to do. He's a familiar figure: the anime-eyed aspirant cliché, the wounded-artist center in films from Bloodbrothers to Boys in the Hood that Gray acknowledges as an inspiration. There's even a bit of Saturday Night Fever, which seems to be the inspiration for Shauna's character. But when a couple of disco preeners wander into the bar, and they're dismissed without any allusion to the racism that would have greeted them, Drinkers seems especially misty-eyed -- and disingenuous -- about the era in which it's set.
Despite the fact that the movie feels awash in the resignation that many of the bar habitués register, the veteran actors -- Lang, Allen and Peter Riegert -- put their shoulders into the effort. Local theater owner Whitey (Riegert) is involved in a plan to bring new luster and popularity to his place, and this subplot alone is strong enough to have merited its own film. Unlike so much of White Irish Drinkers, it's one of the few elements that isn't right on the nose -- right down to the title.