The House Gun

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latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2011/06/chace-crawford-gossip-girl-nate-archibald-footloose-house-gun-pierce-brosnan.html


EXCLUSIVE: Chace Crawford has begun to push out in some interesting filmic directions. Known as the hypotenuse of the Serena-Blair love triangle on TV's "Gossip Girl," the 25-year-old played a philosophical drug dealer in Joel Schumacher's "Twelve" last year and recently signed on to star opposite Katie Holmes in a romantic comedy called "Responsible Adults."

Now he looks to take a turn to the political. Crawford is attached to play the role of an accused South African murderer in "The House Gun," an independent-film adaptation of an acclaimed novel from Nobel Prize-winner Nadine Gordimer, according to a person familiar with the production who asked not to be identified because financing details for the film were still being worked out.

Pierce Brosnan is also attached to play Crawford's father, a respected architect who is convinced of his son's innocence, the source said.

Gordimer's 1998 novel focuses on Harald Lingard (Brosnan) and his son, who at the start of the novel is accused of shooting and killing his housemate. The family then hires a black lawyer, in what becomes a story of morality and race in post-apartheid South Africa. The lawyer role has yet to be cast.

The film is being produced by the company behind the screwball family comedy "City Island," which became an art-house hit last year. A principal at the company declined to comment on "House Gun" casting.

Crawford had initially been cast in the lead role Kevin Bacon made famous in the upcoming "Footloose" remake, but left in part because of the rigors of the "Gossip Girl" shooting schedule.

The route from the CW to the big screen is not always a smooth one. But Crawford has some esteemed footsteps to follow: His "Gossip Girl" costar Blake Lively appeared in last fall's Ben Affleck-directed crime drama "The Town" and stars opposite Ryan Reynolds in the upcoming "Green Lantern."

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Amazon.com Review

"There is no privacy more inviolable than that of the prisoner. To visualize that cell in which he is thinking, to reach what he alone knows; that is a blank in the dark."

Privileged whites in post-apartheid South Africa, Harald and Claudia Lindgard have managed to live the better part of 50 years without ever confronting the deepest shadows in their culture or in their own souls. Though they conceive of themselves as liberal-minded, neither has ever taken any active political stand; neither has ever been in any black person's home. Harald sits on the board of an insurance company; Claudia is a compassionate doctor. Neither of them has ever been inside a courtroom before; neither has ever been inside a prison. When their architect-son, Duncan, is arrested for murder, both know that the charge is preposterous. But Duncan himself fails to deny his guilt, and his parents are brought by a harsh and ungainly process to accept the possibility that he has committed an unthinkable crime.

Nadine Gordimer's The House Gun is a gravely sustained exploration of their long-delayed but necessary descent into an intimate acquaintance with the culture of violence that surrounds them and that is "the common hell of all who are associated with it." The novel is a mystery, but not in the usual sense of the whodunit. Here the question of who quickly gives way to why and thence to other, still deeper quandaries of culpability, both immediate and ultimate. The enigmatic Duncan becomes a dark mirror in which his stunned parents must desperately grope for a new vision of themselves and their world--a vision that will not shatter, as their old one has, under a single blow from reality.

Gordimer's prose is mannered and severe; humor is rare, or absent. "As the couple emerge into the foyer of the courts, vast and lofty cathedral echoing with the susurration of its different kind of supplicants gathered there, Claudia suddenly breaks away, disappearing towards the sign indicating toilets. Harald waits for her among these people patient in trouble, no choice to be otherwise, for them, he is one of them, the wives, husbands, fathers, lovers, children of forgers, thieves and murderers." This difficult exposition is the reader's own dark mirror, where we as spectators fumble from one dubious explanation to the next--a twisted reflection always reminding us that, underlying this social tragedy, there is a mystery play in the old sense, and an unanswerable question: What is a human being? Paragraph after paragraph, the reader is led into deeper and deeper perceptions of the sensibilities and the dilemmas of these characters--into a quiet intimacy with their trouble that is sometimes acutely uncomfortable, but which pays off richly in an ending that reconciles our sense of the horror of violence with our desire to believe in the value of each life. --Daniel Hintzsche --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Harald and Claudia, highly successful professionals (he heads up an insurance company, she is a physician), find their comfortable life in post-apartheid South Africa turned upside down when their only son is accused of murdering one of his housemates, using the communal "house gun" they had purchased for protection. The parents are dumbfounded when Duncan does not deny the crime. How could their son be a murderer, and are they somehow to blame? Duncan acted out of jealousy, but was it heterosexual jealousy or something else? He is going to be defended by a black attorney. Will the attorney's lack of courtroom experience be a liability, or will his race favorably influence the judge? Harald and Claudia are ashamed to find themselves asking these questions. Nobel laureate Gordimer's book is much more ambitious than the plot-driven thrillers of Scott Turow or John Grisham. It is a novel of ideas that investigates troubling issues of race and gender, but it is also a subtle character study that avoids easy stereotypes. Gordimer's trademark prose style, with its sudden shifts of voice and points of view, seems especially well suited to capturing the moral ambiguities of South African life. Highly recommended. - Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch., Los Angeles

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Interesting. He's not attached on the IMDB but Bruce Beresford is attached at the NY Times site as the director and on the Production Company site

www.luckymonkeypictures.com/projects/housegun.htm

movies.nytimes.com/movie/457918/The-House-Gun/overview

Production Credits

Director - Bruce Beresford
Source Material - Nadine Gordimer
Producer - Lauren Versel
Producer - Maria Teresa Arida

Lucky Monkey Pictures - Production Company
Locations: South Africa

Review Summary

A wealthy couple's lives are plunged into chaos when their grown son kills a friend. ~ Baseline StudioSystems

Movie Details

Title: The House Gun
Status: In Development
Country: United Kingdom, United States
Genre: Adaptation, Drama, Foreign