Gun Hill Road (2011) - Rashaad Ernesto Green

After serving three years in prison, Enrique returns home to the Bronx to discover his life as he knows it has changed drastically.  His wife, Angela, struggles with her feelings, torn between her old husband and a new man she recently met.  Enrique's teenage son, Michael, represents an even larger concern for Enrique, as this young man struggles with his sexuality, routinely dressing up as a woman, the only way Michael feels comfortable in his own skin.  Coming from a tough, criminal lifestyle, Enrique struggles to grasp and understand his son's sexuality, clinging to his own masculine ideals of what a man should be.  Rashaad Ernesto Green's Gun Hill Road presents an effective portrait of a family turn apart by incarceration, being a powerful study of a young man attempting to discover himself in an environment that defines a man's worth by very primitive ideals centered around  masculinity. Gun Hill Road works best in its sensitive depiction of Michael's struggle, relaying the day-to-day aspects of a young man attempting to find himself.  His father Enrique is a man who simply cannot fathom his son being a homosexual, being a man whose urban ideals of masculinity are  defined by toughness.  Using this broken family unit, Gun Hill Road paints an effective portrait of the struggle of re-assimilation that many convicts have back into society, though the film does come off a little "after-school special" at times.  My biggest critique of Gun Hill Road would that it's simply too over-stuffed with melodrama.  From the mother's emotional struggle to decide between her old and new relation, Michael's struggle with his sexuality, and Enrique's struggle with becoming a father figure, Gun Hill Road could have benefited from a little less drama.  I wish the film would have not bothered with the mother's love triangle, as it doesn't add much, just taking away from the film's ability to offer a more pensive study of the disgusting viewpoint that this urban lifestyle has on homosexuality.  With a few extremely powerful and poignant sequences, with the prostitution scene being a high point, Gun Hill Road is a solid independent film exploring a broken family unit, that could have certainly benefited form a more streamlined narrative.  

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