Rocket Gibraltar

On his seventy-seventh birthday Levi Rockwell's whole family comes to his house on Long Island. He is at a distance from his grown children; everyone is busy with their own troubles and nobody really talks to their father. With the grandchildren it is different. He tells them Viking stories, and one day he says what he wants for himself: to be sent out to sea on a burning boat. The children take that as a wish. Daniel Petrie's film is a family-gathering film; its real subject is who hears whom across the generations. Burt Lancaster plays Levi in one of the parts from the late stretch of his career. The boy playing one of the grandchildren is Macaulay Culkin; it is his first film, two years before Home Alone. Patricia Clarkson and Frances Conroy are also in the cast, both of them barely known at the time. The film starts light and is not light at all by the end.