Breakwater | Review
Dermot Mulroney in Breakwater
Water Drops on Stinking Rocks: Mulroney Gets Muddled in Comatose Thriller
By Nicholas Bell | Published on December 21, 2023
In the trailing whispers of 2023’s last batch of film releases, many could potentially be left pondering what’s going on with actor Dermot Mulroney’s career. Memorable for his dashing charms in a variety of studio and indie films from the 1990s and 2000s, Mulroney always hovered on the precipice of breaking out as a leading man, partially because he also seemed to pop up in odd productions, which seemed to resist such predictable templates likely reserved for him. Having had several projects released throughout the past year, a trio of them arrived in quick succession this December, though none of them are doing him any favors. Between playing a high school coach turned sex worker savior in Ruthless and a bumbling father of the bride in Will Gluck’s poorly executed rom-com Anyone But You, Mulroney also has the dismal Breakwater hitting theaters. In comparison, it’s the best of the bunch (at least in how he's utilized), but it’s something of a fool’s triumph. Interestingly, it’s the sophomore feature of director James Rowe, someone who’s been teaching directing and screenwriting for the past two decades following his 1999 debut Blue Ridge Fall, and his latest feels like those B-grade direct-to-video adult thrillers of this era. And like his first film, which headlined Peter Facinelli, also centers on the pinched beauty of a young man who makes terrible choices in order to do the right thing.
Dovey (Darren Mann) is about to be released from prison after serving a sentence for a crime he didn’t commit to protect a wealthy ex-girlfriend. His prison mentor, Ray (Mulroney), who has protected the younger man from danger over the past three years, hands him a newspaper clipping featuring a young woman named Marina, who he claims is his estranged daughter. Ray begs Dovey to locate his daughter and report back to him. The only trouble is, this requires Dovey to violate his probation by traveling out of his home state, where he’s forced to reside with his fisherman father (JD Evermore). His probation officer (Sonja Sohn) confirms he’ll need to postpone this adventure for a year to search for his ‘old friend,’ but Ray reveals he’s dying of cancer and doesn’t have the time to wait. Scooting off to North Carolina in secret, Dovey immediately finds Marina, who says her name is Eve (Alyssa Gross), a young woman who runs her own bookstore and gives tours at the local lighthouse, from which the mast of a wrecked ship can now be seen after surfacing during a recent storm. Though she has a seven-year-old daughter, Dovey finds himself falling for Eve, and she responds in kind.
Once Ray learns Dovey has accomplished the task, he stages a fake shanking so he can commandeer an ambulance and make his way to them, which alarms Dovey enough to tell Eve her father is on his way. However, it turns out Eve had quite a different kind of relationship with Ray, and suddenly the two new lovebirds must band together to face the vengeful convict who desires to reclaim something he’d left behind in the possession of Eve.
As Ray, Mulroney harnesses the requisite Machiavellian energy well enough to suggest Rowe could have made a much better film had he not only re-tooled his derivative script considerably but also been more adept at directing his younger cast members. Mann and Gross have a difficult time chewing through Rowe’s more overwrought passages, for instance. In reference to Ray, Eve wails, “He trades in emotional debt!” Dovey often slips into savior-sage mode, as if he suffers from dissociative identity disorder when probing Eve to tell the truth about her past. “The devil doesn’t come for the innocent,” he solemnly admonishes.
Rowe seems to be borrowing heavily from the toolbox of ‘90s neo-noirs, particularly those which were remakes of 1950s noir classics, such as Martin Scorsese’s version of Cape Fear (1991) or Michael Cimino’s revamp of Desperate Hours (1990), where two male leads spar over controlling the fate of the family or the feminine. Mulroney isn’t quite at the level of Robert Mitchum’s archetypes, even if The Night of the Hunter (1955) might briefly come to mind, especially when he’s forced to navigate sneering dialogue such as “I love the way you lie” to his lover/daughter Eve (though her status as femme fatale paired with her chosen name symbolizing the Judeo-Christian mythological 'first woman' suggests a subversion the film never taps into). But Mulroney’s presence suggests he’d be well cast opposite someone like David Strathairn (think his supporting role as Tom Cruise’s compromised sibling in 1993’s The Firm).
Also working against the film’s narrative energies is Kai Krause’s cinematography, awash in a warm sheen, blasting the key players with light when some visual signifiers would have heightened the clandestine motivations of all this criminal activity. Odd details in the periphery also suggest the visual tonality is as catawampus as the performances, such as the possibility of the resurfaced wreck potentially being a scuttled slaver (bringing to mind Margaret Brown’s 2022 documentary Descendent, and the effect such a discovery might have on the local community). Likewise, there’s the wasted addition of Mena Suvari who pops up as a waitress working at a pub in close proximity to the prison. She’s able to clock Dovey as an ex-con because he sits in the corner, his back to the wall. In one of the film’s few interesting attempts at character traits, it seems Kendra the waitress is more of a seductive siren who likes to take advantage of men hungry for the touch of a woman, seemingly making a habit of locking them up at night in the restaurant for quick sex in dingy booths.
Shallow and unfortunately quite boring, Rowe’s major crime with his first film in twenty odd years is wasting the opportunity of really utilizing the murky human elements of his characters. There are a myriad of more interesting possibilities which could have and should have been explored, heightening the desperation and the loyalties of these intersecting characters. Just imagine if Dovey had also been Ray's prison lover, which challenges his newfound allegiance to Eve? The stakes aren't nearly high enough for any real kind of tension, suggesting a few tight twists on this old screw would have allowed for something more emotionally vicious, which certainly exists beyond these layers of familiarity.
★☆☆☆☆