Movie Reviews : “ ‘68” Makes Goulash of Intra-Family Conflicts

It’s too bad that writer-director Steven Kovacs’ ambitions so vastly exceed his abilities because his “ ‘68” (Mann Westwood) should be a wonderful movie instead of the disaster that it is.

Consider the irony: a Hungarian flees his native land with his family in the wake of the crushed ’56 revolution and makes a new life as a baker in San Francisco, only to find his sons caught up in another rebellion, of which he strongly disapproves. Sadly, however, “ ‘68” is so amateurish in virtually every aspect that it is punishing to watch. Its genuine warmth and passion--and its worthy portrait of the disintegration of an Old World patriarch--dissipate in the wake of too much bad acting, writing and directing.

Peter (Eric Larson), a UC Berkeley student, and his younger brother Sandy (Robert Locke) soon find themselves responding to all that’s happening around them. Their hard-working parents (Anna Dukasz and Sandor Tecsi) have managed to parlay their bakery into a restaurant, which they open on New Year’s Eve, 1967. Peter soon gets caught up in the anti-war movement, horrifying a Zoltan still filled with an immigrant’s patriotism.

For awhile “ ‘68” gets by on its obvious good intentions. But as Kovacs puts Hendrix and Joplin on the sound track and starts showing coverage of the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the rioting at the Democratic convention in Chicago, you may well find yourself growing resentful. That’s because these events and icons of an age--painful in their authenticity--make so much trite direction and shallow, cliched writing ring false. You’re finally left with the feeling that for all Kovacs’ dogged sincerity, he is guilty of exploiting the artifacts of an era because he is so ham-fisted in his handling of them.

The perfect fate for “ ‘68” (MPAA-rated R for sex, nudity and strong language) would be to wind up on a double bill with that other awful semi-autobiographical immigrant saga of the ‘60s, Arthur Penn and Steve Tesich’s 1981 “Four Friends.”