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Huffington Post
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Jamey Sheridan talks a 'Handsome' game
by Marshall Fine
March 18, 2010
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Forget "Don't ask/don't tell." The guys in Handsome Harry don't even want to know.
"Those guys weren't thinking about 'Don't ask/don't tell'," says actor Jamey Sheridan, who plays the film's title character. "No one was asking about anything. In the world they lived in, they'd have gotten their head punched in. That's really what they were concerned about."
Opening April 16, Handsome Harry deals with a group of Navy buddies who harbor a shameful secret from 1973.
Thirty years later, Harry gets a phone call from one of the group, who is dying and filled with remorse. Fearful of retribution in the afterlife, the former shipmate makes Harry promise to fseek forgiveness. That sends Harry on a journey to track down the other shipmates, while coming to terms with his own role in the incident.
"It was a story that put its hooks into me," says Sheridan, 58. "The night I read it, two things grabbed me. One was that it had jazz as a source of a love affair and I've loved jazz since I was 17. And the other was the psychology was interesting because he's a person who commits a crime of which he's also the potential victim. It's this thing of wanting to be the victim and the perpetrator at the same time.
"I think of him as a guy in blackout. I had the good fortune to do 'Long Day's Journey into Night' with Jason Robards and we would talk about blackouts, where you sort of disappear for two weeks and don't know where you were until the alcohol wears off and you sober up a little. I would call Harry's condition an incomplete blackout.
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LA Times
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Calling up 'Harry'
by Mark Olson
April 10, 2010
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"Handsome Harry," opening Friday in limited release, including Los Angeles, finds another lone man delving into his past to decipher his future.
Filmmaker Bette Gordon is best known for "Variety," her early-'80s look at a woman working in the ticket booth of a dirty movie theater on New York City's then-sleazy 42nd Street. Gordon emerged from the same New York City arts scene as Kathryn Bigelow, and "Variety" is now considered a landmark for both female filmmaking and the then-emergent American independent film movement.
With "Handsome Harry," Gordon examines the world of male friendship with the same distanced, inquisitive eye she previously brought to the female experience. After Harry Sweeney (Jamey Sheridan) receives a surprising deathbed phone call from an old Navy buddy (Steve Buscemi), he is sent on an odyssey to piece together what really happened one drunken, violent night many years ago.
"Harry was not that different," Gordon said during a recent phone call of her switch to examining the male perspective. "I see the movie more as a reflection on similar themes.
"You can't examine gender only from one point of view. The real examination of gender and sexuality has two sides, actually probably more than two."
The cast and crew of "Variety" included such future downtown notables such as Nan Goldin, John Lurie, Tom DiCillo, Spalding Gray and Christine Vachon, and with "Handsome Harry" Gordon again pulls together a rather remarkable team of collaborators. In addition to Sheridan and Buscemi, the cast includes Aidan Quinn, John Savage, Titus Welliver and Campbell Scott as the rest of Harry's old Navy buddies.
Gordon is also a longtime professor at Columbia University's graduate film division, where Nicholas Proferes, screenwriter of "Handsome Harry," is a colleague.
"It was a perfect combination of this beautiful story he'd written and my female lens on a world he inhabited, a very male world," said Gordon.
"Even though I had made movies about renegade female characters," added Gordon, "and as different as this is, it isn't that different. The male journey is not dissimilar. I've always been trying to understand the male language, which sometimes is very secret and private."
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