‘Bound by Honor’: A Wake-Up Call to Audiences

“Bound by Honor’--Taylor Hackford’s Masterpiece & Metaphor.”

That’s the kind of headline I was expecting to find in the L.A. Times after I was fortunate enough to see a recent preview screening of this movie.

Instead, I found “ ‘Bound by Honor’--Boyz ‘n the Barrio?” (Calendar, April 30) and a review by Times film critic Kenneth Turan that called it “approximately three hours of violent, cartoonish posturing incongruously set in the realistically evoked milieu of East Los Angeles.”

What movie did Turan see? Certainly not the one I saw.

“Bound by Honor” is a riveting odyssey, rich with myth and unforgettable imagery. It is a feast of sight and sound--poetry, music, dance and emotion--and possibly one of the most powerful and important films of the decade.

The 1,100 people in the audience at my screening wept openly through much of it and gave it a five-minute standing ovation.

As a reader of The Times, I have followed the continual comparisons made between this and the movie “American Me.” In their early stages, when there was an overlapping of the same writer on both projects, the two movies may have been similar. But in their ultimate making, they are very different pictures.

“American Me” director Edward James Olmos is an actor of note and a community activist to be admired, but a onetime director; Taylor Hackford is a filmmaker with a body of work who deserves much more respect than to be written off by Turan as “embracing all manner of bogus emotional and dramatic situations.” That kind of dismissal of a leading American director whose courage and commitment to a film survived many years in the making is one of the reasons American cinema is lagging critically behind the rest of the international scene.

Hackford should be applauded for making a movie that is as intelligent as it is entertaining; for giving us this metaphor of our modern predicament that doesn’t preach but does show the way to healing.

By fictionalizing gang names and the real-life participants in Mexican prison gangs, “Bound by Honor” transcends being a story about the ills plaguing barrio life and three kids who want nothing more than a cause they can die for--and takes in all families, whatever color. Hollywood Pictures should be applauded for releasing a big-budget film, predominantly employing Latinos in its cast and crew, with no major box-office stars.

Turan merely mentions the name of Jimmy Santiago Baca, the Chicano poet and writer, who is mainly responsible for the current script and for some of the most beautiful prose to appear in any film ever. The review does not mention Baca’s years in prison and the experiences he drew on in creating the script and the prison sequences that Turan found “distasteful without being particularly convincing.”

To dismiss the acting as “cartoonish posturing”--with not even one perfunctory commendation--astounds me. What I saw in the leads--Benjamin Bratt, Jesse Borrego and Damian Chapa--and in supporting actors like Enrique Castillo and Victor Rivers were inspired and brilliantly directed performances.

Watching the work of Bratt as Paco, the barrio bad boy gone good, and Rivers as Magic Mike in the prison sequences, is worth the price of admission. While Turan calls “American Me” a “wake-up call to the Latino community,” I think “Bound by Honor” is a real wake-up call to white middle-class viewers like me.

I find it incomprehensible how anyone can see this movie and not come away affected by it--not only for the insights into a culture that is lovingly and richly painted with all its heart and passion--but even more for the stark revelation of how those of us outside that community can no longer turn our backs to the great potential coming from that culture.