Arthur Penn’s Four Friends starts
with the arrival of young Danilo and his mother in America, after traveling from Yugoslavia to join the steel-worker father he’s hardly ever met; ten years
later, in the early sixties, Danilo and his two best friends are giddy with
music and their shared love for the same girl, Georgia, trying to push away the father’s insistence that college isn’t for the factory-bound likes of him. By
the film’s end, some eight years later, Danilo will have made it to college,
but hardly as part of a smooth upward trajectory; he’ll have gone from being so
patriotic that (we’re told) he goes to football games just to sing the national
anthem, to a more nuanced, fluid, sometimes pained view of the country and his place
within it. The film’s title serves as a symbol of its evasiveness, of the difficulty
of summing up even the simplest aspects of American life, in that after the
first twenty minutes or so, two of the four friends are pushed to the sidelines
of the narrative, receiving far less screen time than a fifth friend, Louie,
who is Danilo’s college roommate. It’s through Louie that Danilo gains entry
for a while into the milieu of the super-rich, an expedition that takes in some
perversity-tinged dysfunction and then ends in grotesque tragedy; from there he
goes to driving a New York cab, apparently embracing total personal disrepair,
a pivot that brings to mind the audacious narrative and tonal shifts of Little
Big Man, perhaps Penn’s greatest film. It comes to mind at the end too via a
culminating remark that one day they may look back on all this and not remember
a thing, echoing the earlier film’s resigned conclusion that sometimes the
magic works and sometimes it doesn’t. By conventional measures Four Friends
often stumbles, but then, how would a smoother film have been truer to such a fraught
time and place?
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