TIMOTHY HUTTON & SEAN PENN 'THE FALCON AND THE SHOWMAN'

Sean Penn in THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN Year: 1983 Rating: ***1/2

In THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN, about two young California-born former-Alter-boy rich kids who wound up selling secret documents to the Russians, Timothy Hutton — who won an Oscar for ORDINARY PEOPLE — had the chance to play the role of a lifetime since Christopher Boyce, working within the CIA before his capture, had already broken out of jail and robbed 17 banks before the source biography/novel became a motion picture...

But instead of playing Boyce as the sneakily charming sociopath he really was, director John Schlesinger reveals him as a starry-eyed pacifist while his TAPS co-star Sean Penn, as drug dealing partner Andrew Lee Daulton, not only does the real work but (practically alone) ignites the most suspenseful scenes...

Timothy Hutton in THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN

British auteur Schlesinger began an eclectic career making his country's kitchen sink (working-class-centered) melodramas before directing MIDNIGHT COWBOY, a New York City character-driven classic involving polar opposites Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman...

But THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN attempts more suspenseful moments that carried the director's 1976 thriller MARATHON MAN while hardly providing any significant motivation for Hutton's risky plight...

Sean Penn in THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN with David Suchet

Ironically (but maybe not coincidentally) Penn seems to be doing an imitation of Hoffman's nasally, paranoid and tremendously neurotic MIDNIGHT COWBOY con-man Ratso Rizzo with Hutton the stridently one-note anti-hero, who soon tires of the ultimately undependable pawn: from the start Penn's  sent back and forth to the American Embassy in Mexico, where he not only sells top secret satellite codes but shares the edgiest moments between David Suchet as one of two Russians agents...

Their chemistry... beginning coolly professional before progressing into strategic mind-games... underlines the tense espionage that should have existed more between the two young leads — and had this been a fictional thriller titled THE SNOWMAN (from Lee's cocaine business) without THE FALCON (Boyce adored Falcons as much as he despised America), there might have been something really great here instead of the pretty good propaganda-piece it often seems lazily content on being. 

Sean Penn in THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN

Sean Penn in THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN

Sean Penn in THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN

Sean Penn in THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN

Timothy Hutton in THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN

Dorian Harewood in THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN

Mady Kaplan in THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN

Chris Makepeace and Priscilla Pointer in THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN

Sean Penn in THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN

Sean Penn in THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN

Sean Penn in THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN

Sean Penn in THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN

Sean Penn in THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN with Timothy Hutton