Barriers

Tori (Jamaul Roots), a Manhattan prep school student, is losing a schoolyard fight when a passing boy comes to his aid. Tori befriends the boy, nicknamed Snake (Geoff Garcy), not caring that he comes from a poor neighborhood. The two begin spending their days together and greatly enjoy each other's company, but when Snake's older brother, Keith (Derrick Robberts), learns of the friendship, he coerces Snake into agreeing to steal something valuable from Tori's home when the opportunity arises.

Since both of Tori's parents work, Tori's mother (Julie Henry) hires a young woman, Phil (Annie Golden), to watch him after school. One afternoon, Phil reluctantly agrees to let Tori have Snake over, although she knows Tori's parents would object. The boys have fun playing, but while momentarily alone, Snake finds and pockets a credit card receipt, which he later gives to Keith.

A few days afterwards, Tori's father (Sedley Bloomfield) finds a large, unexplained expense on his credit card bill. Phil tells Tori that she suspects Snake, but Tori denies Snake's involvement. Phil also passes her suspicions to Tori's father, who fires her in anger. The firing upsets Tori, who had become close to Phil, and strains the relationship between him and his father.

Days later, Tori encounters Snake outside a store, which he is helping Keith to rob. The attempt goes awry, Keith is shot and the two boys flee to nearby Central Park. There, Snake admits that he stole the receipt, but Tori vows to remain his friend anyway. An armed and wounded Keith finds the pair and attempts to shoot Tori, but accidentally kills his brother. Later, at Phil's, Tori blames himself for Snake's death, although Phil assures him that it wasn't his fault. Tori's parents arrive, and before they take their son home, Tori and Phil pledge friendship to one another.

Overly earnest and underdeveloped, BARRIERS has little to recommend it. Perhaps one's expectations shouldn't be too high for a feature that cost $135,000, but BARRIERS is inept even in consideration of its budgetary limitations. Director Alan Baxter and writer-producer Charles Ricciardi have set out to analyze how class difference serves as an artificial and often insurmountable obstacle to normal human interaction, but they've done so in a crude, obvious manner. The characters they've created are stereotypes (e.g., Tori's rich parents are insensitive snobs, Snake's older brother is shady) and the story line they've composed is predictable and cliched.

Baxter employs extensive location shooting, in such New York neighborhoods as Harlem and the Upper West Side, to demonstrate how geographic distance reinforces class divisions. It's an interesting concept, but BARRIERS has been so clumsily assembled that the locales and the distances between them are never clearly established. Much of the problem lies in the editing, which is rife with continuity errors. The film has other technical shortcomings: the cinematography is adequate, but the soundtrack is tinny, occasionally out of sync, and has been so poorly mixed that the background music sometimes drowns out the dialogue.

The performances are about at the level of the rest of the production, amateurish and unconvincing. Derrick Robberts does manage to bring some vibrancy to his role, but Annie Golden, ironically one of the few recognizable cast members, actually comes off worse than her lesser known costars in an embarrassingly flat attempt at comic relief. Roots and Garcy are fairly good individually but have absolutely no chemistry between them, a fault that renders the film's key relationship lifeless.

BARRIERS does, however, boast what has to be the year's most indelible bit of casting: Quentin Crisp as a gun-toting deli clerk. Crisp's oddball presence is as welcome here as it is inexplicable. (Violence, sexual situations, extreme profanity.) leave a comment