Gun Hill Road
by Andrew Schenker on July 31, 2011
http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/gun-hill-road/5659 (http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/gun-hill-road/5659)
There is no shortage of narrative films that use location shooting as a way of importing some vague notion of authenticity to their stories, but how many of these movies actually engage with their setting in a meaningful way? Certainly not Gun Hill Road, which, give or take a street exterior of men hanging outside a bodega or a pretty shot of two subway trains passing in the night, might as well have been shot on a Hollywood soundstage rather than the Bronx neighborhood clustered around the eponymous thoroughfare.
This questing after realism translates equally to the film's camera setups (the conspicuously ugly, frequently jerky framings and reliance on available light) and gritty subject matter. Opening with a vicious attack carried out on a jailhouse rival by soon-to-be-released Enrique Rodriguez (Esai Morales), the film cuts to the no less heated drama of this now ex-con readjusting to family life in the Bronx, his anger and incomprehension fueled by his detection of his wife's infidelity and his son's status as a (pre-op) transsexual.