"Six Ways to Sunday" begins with the Isaac Hayes rendition of 'What A Friend We Have in Mother' and shows a piece of electrical wire running from the mother's bedroom to that of her son's. This is a disturbing film by Jonathan Demme, taken from a novel called 'Portrait of a Young Man Drowning', but it is also fun to watch because the film is understated enough that you are guessing all along which way it might be going. Harry Odom is a young man who could be a cross between the Malcolm McDowell character in "A Clockwork Orange" and Norman Bates. He has an affliction, he isn't sure about his own sexuality because his dominating mother, Kate, insures that he be devoted solely to her, to the point of bathing him herself and controlling the light switch in his room while constantly reminding him of the deadbeat father that left them. There is sexual tension between mother and son, a latency that will eventually show itself. Danny flips hamburgers as a dead end job in a dead end town, Youngstown, Ohio. He appears to be a loner but he has a special friend, Madden, an imagined alter ego who lusts whereas Harry can't. He also cannot control himself when he gets violent but a local mobster, Mr. Louis Varga, sees him as a budding hitman that he can groom and control like his current henchman, Abie Pinkwise. Danny has to endure a series of crisis and you wonder if this is all staged by Mr. Varga to see what is Danny's mental fortitude, especially since the first encounter involves Bill, the double-agent, who tests Harry's loyalty to the mob. Could Iris be a put-on, is the Uncle Max character real, and will Harry really go through with rubbing Abie out? By film's end, Harry has turned into a cold blooded murderer but we also see a twisted redemption - an anti-hero who is able to walk away with his girl and with his affliction. The cast is not particularly outstanding, Deborah Harry as Kate and Norman Reedus as Harry, but the integrity of the film doesn't depend on the acting as much as on the joy of peeling away at the story layer by layer until there is nothing left.
Review of Six Ways to Sunday
