By REY FLORES
Every once in a while, there is a film that you may watch and for some reason or another, the story, its images, and soundtrack stick with you for days afterward. The Identical is one of those movies.
If you’re a fan of movies with good tunes like the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line or rock and roll movies like the Ritchie Valens story in La Bamba, you’re in for a treat.
Loosely based on the life of rock and roll legend Elvis Presley, this movie borrows some of the Presley’s life for its plot, but adds some unusual and unexpected twists and turns that deal with the topics of poverty, miscarriage, adoption, and faith in God’s will, despite our doubts and our inability to understand it.
The film starts off with two well-known actors Ray Liotta and Ashley Judd as a Depression-era traveling preacher and his wife baring their souls at one of his tent revival gatherings about a recent miscarriage. Little do they know just how much to heart one attendee takes the minister’s words.
The next thing you know, the preacher and his wife have a baby given to them by that one revival attendee and his wife who recently had twins, but feel that they can only take care of one due to the dad’s joblessness and their economic struggles.
The remainder of the movie chronicles the story of the one brother raised by the preacher and his wife and his lifelong longing for truth, for family, and for something he just cannot put his finger on.
The story carries us through the 1930s all the way through the early 1970s. It’s fun to watch how the filmmakers start the film in a dreary black and white, representative of how people must have felt inside during the Depression, and then we travel to the kitschy 1950s and end in the tacky 1970s of bad fashions and even worse hair.
Especially impressive is actor Blake Rayne’s performance playing both of the twin brothers, the Elvis-like rock star Drexel “The Dream” Helmsley and the unknown “identical” Ryan Wade. Rayne’s uncanny resemblance to the real Elvis Presley will have you doing an amazing number of double-takes during the entire movie.
Actor Ray Liotta has always been one of my favorite actors, so it was great to see him pull off a Southern minister so well at various ages, especially after Liotta’s almost indelible performance as the slick mobster in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas back in 1990.
Actress Ashley Judd also puts in a strong acting job, though knowing her real-life social leanings toward radical feminism and abortion kept me from fully embracing her character. It reminded me of Eva Longoria’s performance in For Greater Glory where she portrays a devout Catholic woman when in real life she is also, like Judd, a supporter of modernist social agendas.
Though we only see them in the beginning and then just a couple of brief times during the rest of the film, actors Amanda Crew and Brian Geraghty do a terrific job as the struggling couple who were Ryan Wade’s biological parents and who with much pain decided to give one of their sons a better life by giving him away to the preacher and his wife.
I must add that I truly enjoyed seeing actor Joe Pantoliano, who also starred in La Bamba back in 1987, looking almost exactly the same as he did about 27 years ago. There’s something very charismatic about this actor and he just seems to fit into these rock and roll movies perfectly.
The Identical also gets major points for delivering a great entertainment experience without any gratuitous profanity or sexual content. This is a movie a family can watch safely without worries.
The Identical opens in theaters on September 5, 2014. Watch the trailer at: www.TheIdenticalMovie
.com.
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(Rey Flores is a Catholic writer and speaker. Contact Rey at reyfloresusa@gmail.com.)
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