Dominick And Eugene

The lachrymose scenario runs as follows: In Pittsburgh, Dominick Luciano (Tom Hulce), a young man who is retarded from a childhood injury, works on a garbage truck to put his twin brother Eugene (Ray Liotta) through medical school. When Eugene gets a scholarship to attend Stanford, he faces the problem of having to abandon his beloved brother. Alvin Sargent and Corey Blechman’s script from a story by Danny Porfirio, far from avoiding the sentimental excess of such a situation, lays it on with a trowel–the death of Dominick’s pet dog is neatly timed to coincide with the news that his brother is leaving him–and the subsequent plot revelations smack of middle-level TV drama, while Jamie Lee Curtis is enlisted to provide Eugene’s semigratuitous love interest. Director Robert M. Young (Alambrista) does some creditable things with the local neighborhood, and Todd Graff as Dominick’s coworker turns in a refreshing, nonstereotyped working-class portrait. But the film’s shameless efforts to reach for the jugular mainly land in bathos. (JR)

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