A September 11 Parable, Five Years Too Late

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The New York Sun

Subtle touches do not grace Anthony Marsellis’s “A Broken Sole,” the film version of a stage production inspired by the events of September 11, 2001, in which a triptych of interlaced vignettes wham viewers upside the head with painful obviousness.

In 2001, the playwright and screenwriter Susan Charlotte was working on a piece about a shoemaker. After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, she read an article about a real shoemaker whose shop became an inadvertent memorial. Its shelves were filled with the shoes left behind by owners who died in the towers.

Hence, the title — and a rather unfortunate pun.

Danny Aiello plays the shoemaker, an Italian immigrant who runs a modest, lived-in shop in Hell’s Kitchen. One afternoon, a flustered college professor (Judith Light) stumbles in as he’s trying to close early, and insists he repair a broken heel. As events unfold, it becomes clear that the woman has been walking for hours amid the chaos of September 11, and probably needs simply to connect with someone else more than she needs the shoe repaired. The cobbler is brusque and dismissive, but gradually reveals his grief over a pair of beautiful black high heels that belonged to a young banker. She won’t be back to get them. After a half-hour of extraordinarily mannered dialogue that bellows, “This movie is really a two-person play,” it turns out that the abandoned high heels fit the professor perfectly. Ms. Light drifts into a monologue about “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” and Mr. Aiello weeps for his character’s Italian father and grandmother, lost to the fascists in World War II. The strokes are broad and heavy.

The second episode likewise concerns an impatient professional’s collision with an old-school Noo Yawker. Laila Robins is a real estate broker rushing to an appointment and instead finds herself stalled in a cab driven by Bob Dishy. (Few of the characters are given names; they are listed as “Shoemaker,” “Customer,” “Cabbie,” etc.) The cabbie is a yakker, a guy who cautiously enunciates every syllable and insts on his own peculiar etiquette. Mr. Dishy, known to stage aficionados and seasoned fans of “Law and Order,” gives a colorful, precise character study of a Gotham archetype that barely seems to exist anymore. He nearly overrides the contrived writing.

A final pas de deux spins toward romantic comedy. An actress (Margaret Colin) discovers after a one-night stand that the theater director (John Shea) she met online only picked her because her name, Nan, is a palindrome. He’s a dyslexic who is weary of pronouncing his girlfriends’ names backward. It’s a cute notion that unfortunately only gets cuter. Any potential pathos is jettisoned when Ms. Colin reveals her character’s real name is Lana.

Sure, it’s tough to redeem a national tragedy through the balm of art, and perhaps “A Broken Sole” enjoyed more impact as a stage production in the more immediate wake of September 11. Audiences may have found something they needed in its robust, emotional encounters. But it’s not the kind of work that begs to be a 100-minute film, and certainly not this long after the fact.


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