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Marine Father, Navy Son
Rating: 4 Stars
Jet Set Productions. Written & directed by Paul Barresi. Videography by Christian Wood. Edited by Marina Pacific Studios. Music by Dennis Walker & His Memphis Horns. Starring Cole Tucker, Scott Matthews, Rob Steel, Alex Wilcox, Reed Parker, Frank Taylor, Anthony Cox, Kris De’Ferr, and Julie Winchester.
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What's right about Marine Father, Navy Son is so right that it would be easy to over-praise this small production whose modest ambitions aren't entirely fulfilled. There are clumsy moments, and the ending feels flat. But this video still glows with first-rate work by Paul Barresi, one of the most distinctive writer/directors in the adult film industry. Handsomely shot, deftly edited and competently scored, it's also classier than Jet Set Productions' usual product.

Marine Father, Navy Son is soap-operatic, but it's full of grace notes. Barresi has an artist's generosity toward his characters. Young newcomer Kris De'Ferr plays a acid-tongued mama's boy who has no interest in getting a job, much less enlisting in the military; Cole Tucker, his stepfather, is a dedicated career Marine. When this recipe for domestic violence comes to a boil, Tucker discusses his wife and stepson with Naval Commander Reed Parker, his best friend, in a bar that caters to servicemen-- some of whom drop into the men's room for casual sex between beers. "I'm afraid she's gonna turn him into a cocksucker," Tucker frets.

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It's not clear whether Tucker's character knows at that point that he's surrounded by cocksuckers, and is one. But when he and Parker kiss, it's as if he's been waiting for that moment all his life. Tucker approaches sex-- first with Parker, then with bartender Rob Steel-- as if religiously awakened to the tactile possibilities of men's bodies. All five sex scenes are sensually intense and verbally alive. The give-and-take of real acting makes the eroticism crackle. The encounter between Parker and De'Ferr has a fierce romantic vitality Barresi hasn't captured since Good Fellas Bad Fellas (1996).

Cole Tucker, who won and deserved the 1999 Probe award for Best Porn Star, is frequently cast as a scary top who can bottom on cue. Here he puts unexpected, complex feeling into a benign variant of the poisonously closeted Marine colonel in American Beauty. Both Tucker and Barresi are erotic artists who know how to celebrate masculinity while lampooning it, critiquing it, and testing its boundaries. They bring to their work a potent combination of maturity and mischief, and their teamwork makes you crave an encore. It's a marriage made in porn heaven.