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'Take'

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BY JOHN ANDERSON | Special to Newsday

July 18, 2008

The grieving parent is the role that separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls, and the real actors from the posers: The slightest emotional miscalculation, and the whole performance goes south.

So it's with a certain apprehension that one watches "Take" star Minnie Driver as Ana, whose son was killed during a supermarket holdup and who is making her way through desert towns and flashbacks en route to the execution of her son's killer. Driver makes certain intelligent choices, director-writer Charles Oliver makes others, and the result is an intensely honest portrayal of a woman suffocating on her own anger, and impotence - something she shares with Saul (Jeremy Renner), whose hard-luck life and gambling addiction has found him with one hand holding a gun, and the other around the throat of a young boy.

Oliver is a raw talent - a lot of "Take" is downright confusing, such as the visions Ana has of young Jesse (Bobby Coleman), before the audience knows he's dead. Saul's Death Row discussions with his prison minister feel like what they are - ways of voicing the existential questions and overwhelming guilt of a man about to die. Dramatically, however, "Take" consistently works, and, with such a story, that's an amazing thing.

(R)

PLOT The fates of a grieving mother and a Death Row inmate interweave and intersect as the echoes of one split second reverberate through their lives.

CAST Minnie Driver, Jeremy Renner

LENGTH 1:39

PLAYING AT Sunshine Cinemas, Manhattan

BOTTOM LINE Driver gives a convincing, moving performance as a grief-paralyzed mother, and Renner is his usual absorbing self as the lost soul who killed her son.