I hadn’t been imagining it—that had been a warning look.

“I’m sure he is,” I said.

“It’s fine,” Gabe said, grinning at both of us, definitely sauced.

He took another long drink.

“It’s fine,” he said again, this time to Madison, his voice soft.

“Okay,” she said, and walked away, but not before tossing her beautiful hair over her shoulder in a very pointed manner.

“They’re protective of you here,” I said once she had left.

Gabe shrugged.

“You and Oliver…” I tried again.

“Are. Friends,” Gabe said, and then crossed his arms as if he was a child about to throw a tantrum.

It was clear he wasn’t going to say any more—not even drunk. I was disappointed but not defeated. I changed tactics.

“You’re working with a dialect coach,” I said. “Have you decided what kind of accent you’ll be using?”

“A posh British one,” he said. “With a hint of Scottish. A little homage to my favorite Bond.”

“Connery.”

“Connery,” he confirmed.

“Is that the biggest challenge with a role like this?” I asked. “The accent?”

He looked at me and drank his beer. He took his time.

“The biggest challenge with a role like this is doing it even when you know you don’t deserve it.”

Film Fans

TOMMY JACKS REVIEW
[EXCERPT]

By David Anderson

WORLD WAR II FILMS ARE a dime a dozen. Every director seems to think that the shortcut to an Academy Award is making a movie where handsome young men in period clothes and dirty faces stare up at a sky full of enemy planes and then run through a muddy field as shells explode around them.

Annoyingly, most of these directors are correct. These movies are, without a doubt, Oscar-bait. If they are actually deserving of the award, however, remains to be seen.

Tommy Jacks has all the trappings of such a film. You have the handsome young men, you have the dirty faces, and the running through the mud. There’s the requisite love story between an earnest soldier and his blushing bride-to-be. There’s enough patriotism to make an American flag cry.

And if those were the only things it had, it would be as cliché and forgettable as most of its brothers-in-film.

But Tommy Jacks has something that those other movies don’t have. It has Oliver Matthias.

As the titular Tommy, Matthias wants out of the small town, a place where he is constantly butting up against his family’s expectations. It’s clear, immediately, that he’s too clever for his own good—that he believes he’s destined for better things.