On Dangerous Ground (1952)
Director Nicholas Ray was known for imbuing his thrillers with an almost naive, sad-eyed desperation, and that suits his romantic chase noir, On Dangerous Ground, to a tee. The picture depends upon clichés that were old hat before the talkies, but it transcends them, primarily because we’re more accustomed to encountering them in a romantic melodrama that might more closely resemble Marty than a nastier thriller centering on the hunt for a young girl’s killer. The policeman on the hunt, Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) sees himself through the killer’s sister’s (Ida Lupino) blind eyes and calls himself out on a life that’s been dominated by cynicism and recklessness. We don’t roll our eyes at the second act pathos, nor the Lupino martyr, we’re instead thrown for a loop, wondering what the hell is going on.
It helps that Ray and Ryan are nearly unrivaled in this sort of business. Ray’s pictures aren’t calculated, but raw, almost uncomfortably melancholy and self-conscious. In a Lonely Place is another picture that starts down a familiar path (Hollywood screenwriter, murder, etc.) only to end on a devastating note of miscommunication and un-purged rage. There’s also, of course, Rebel without a Cause, a picture that never annoys from overexposure, if only because it’s authentically unforgettable, a nightmare exploration of the chasm between the generations (just as In a Lonely Place was exploring the un-crossable differences between the genders). On Dangerous Ground has similar conviction in itself, and Wilson ranks as another refreshingly understated, poignant Ray creation. The first three scenes tell us all: one cop hugs his wife, one cop watches TV with his family, Wilson examines pictures of suspects at the dinner table alone. Too bad the picture feels the need, in the first act, to repeatedly remind us of Wilson’s disillusion with needless dialogue, but even this doesn’t irritate, it contributes to the broad, dreamy vibe of the picture, to its big, broken, bleeding heart.
Ray could’ve gotten all of that out of a mediocre actor (and has) but Robert Ryan appears, in all of the pictures I’ve seen at least, to be incapable of giving of a false or boring performance. Ryan can be terrifying even in pictures that aren’t in his league (check his work in the otherwise just ok Crossfire or Clash by Night, both of which can be found in TCM Noirs Vol.2) but when the film manages to be even somewhat up to him the results can be extraordinary, such as The Set-Up, The Naked Spur, the iconic The Wild Bunch, or even here. Ryan, like many of my favorite leading men, has a fascinating, flexible contradiction about himself, he’s scary, badass, childish, noble, buffoonish all, possibly, at once, and can adjust the ingredients seemingly without effort depending upon the part. Wilson is, like the Bogart character in Place, of the not entirely sane school of broken idealists, needing a saint, someone who can in good faith just plain shut up for a while and deal with it, to purify his potentially lethal spiritual toxicity.
On Dangerous Ground follows a traditional three act structure, but the proportions are unusual and further contribute to the surreal discombobulation of the film, while also managing to further dry out the sentimentality. The film is approximately eighty minutes long, thirty of those are devoted to act one, a chase that has little bearing on the official plot (though it organically fleshes out the Wilson character). By minute thirty-five, Wilson has been summoned to another town (to escape problems sprung from his violent practices) to solve a murder. At this point we settle in, expecting twenty minutes or so of fish out of water plotting, the usual no bullshit cop in strange town burlesque, only to have a townsperson spring into a building in the middle of Wilson’s introduction to the prominent townspeople to announce that he’s seen the killer fleeing. Wilson teams up with the father (Ward Bond, very effective) and the remaining forty-five minutes largely constitute this second chase, with the accelerated romance with Lupino, who isn’t, despite first billing, introduced until about minute forty, as a sideline. The film toys with the formula admirably, and embodies what screenwriters preach of underlining character with action.
My only real regret of On Dangerous Ground is that it doesn’t take full advantage of the possible explosions that could be savored from a Robert Ryan-Ida Lupino collaboration. Lupino has proved herself in other roles to be very much Ryan’s equal, but here she’s saddled with an uninteresting male fantasy. Ray exhausts his imagination with the strange pacing, and his empathy with the Wilson character. It’s hard to fault On Dangerous Ground too much though, it’s an original picture with a fantastic lead performance, a clear, hard, amazing visual style, a haunting Bernard Herrman score, and a good as can be expected secondary performance. You don’t roll your eyes at the final kiss, it’s, despite the shortcuts, earned.
★★★½
The Bank Job (2008)
The Bank Job more or less does the job; particularly during the first half, which plays like a smuttier, more politically charged Rififi. The film has an appealing, cynical texture of just another thing for the dollar erotic manipulation. For the opening fifty minutes or so, one can be forgiven for mistakenly feeling that director Roger Donaldson and screenwriters Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement have cooked up something as entertaining as Donaldson’s best film, No Way Out.
The film, possibly by necessity, peters out in the middle though, splintering and becoming more and more convoluted at a time when the story should be landing its vicious punch lines, ultimately lacking the fatalistic bloody charge of the great heist pictures. Stir that with an obvious lack of originality and you’ve got a firm, no real problem “not bad” picture, though it tells you something about its impact that I’m struggling now, just a few days after seeing it, to remember how the damn thing ends.
The plot’s bouncing back and forth from one wronged party to another structure (like a less annoying Guy Ritchie movie) may tempt you to spend the remaining running time pondering why the film’s stars, Jason Statham and Saffron Burrows, haven’t made a larger impact on the Hollywood movie. They both have the inarguable stuff, lending The Bank Job a juice that it doesn’t have the common sense to really run with. Statham has been appearing in disreputable little genre pictures for some time, and it tells you something about his appeal that I’ve seen most all of them. Statham has that impossible to fake no bullshit I was probably a bouncer before getting into acting as a lark authority of a true old school star bad ass, imbuing even the dumbest of situations and dialogue with a wonderful grit and resignation. I wouldn’t suggest watching the dreadful London, even for him, but Statham’s presence occasionally allows you to forget that picture’s banality and unpleasantness.
I’m sorry to admit that I did largely forget about Burrows since catching her in Deep Blue Sea (I missed her Figgis pictures), though I remember her resurfacing last year in Reign Over Me and lending a thankless male masturbatory fantasy a palpable vulnerable danger, we feel as if director Mike Binder is cutting away from a decent erotic thriller in favor of yet another one of Adam Sandler’s attempts to prove that he can play the castrated frat boy just as well as the psychotic one. That movie is awful; one of the more irritating I caught last year, but Burrows’ impression is lasting. And, if I may be allowed one male indulgence, she is incredibly, nearly supernaturally, beautiful. One would rob a bank, a yacht, perhaps even the White House, to curry favor with this woman.
It would also be unfortunate to forget David Suchet’s performance as a porn king, one of the more dangerous people the titular heist pisses off, though it’s a mark of the film’s disappointing lack of focus that the extent of his rampage is unclear. One may accuse me of being intolerant of ambiguity, but occasionally cluttered filmmaking has to be called cluttered filmmaking. The Bank Job is a decent night at the movies, but that’s kinda the problem, decent should be the last word to occur to one when describing a heist film.
★★★
Thieves Like Us (1974)
Last Tuesday a new bells and wells anniversary edition of Bonnie and Clyde was released, and while I bought it with little thought, I’m afraid I haven’t gotten the opportunity to watch it yet. I probably wouldn’t have tackled it anyway, chances are if you’re interested enough in movies to read my humble blog, then you know Arthur Penn’s justifiably legendary masterpiece. Perhaps you also know Robert Altman’s similarly themed picture, Thieves Like Us, too, but the odds of you not are at least a bit greater.
This week was the first time I had seen Thieves Like Us and, having seen most of Altman’s films, you’d think I’d cease to be surprised by the very particular mojo that that American master was able to work in any given project. Altman’s intuitiveness, his humanity, and his versatility are all beyond reproach; the man excelled in virtually every genre, with the possible exception of the horror film, though a case can be made for the underrated The Gingerbread Man as almost belonging to that genre. Gingerbread Man is certainly the only Grisham movie with any real tang, with Francis Coppola’s appealing, leisurely The Rainmaker coming in second.
But I digress. Thieves Like Us is, in broad terms, Altman’s outlaw thriller, based on the novel of the same name by Edward Anderson, which also inspired the Nicholas Ray picture They Live By Night, which I have not yet seen. The film’s set-up is traditional to the genre: it’s Mississippi in the 1930s, and three criminals Chicamaw (John Schuck), T-Dub (Bert Remsen) and Bowie (Keith Carradine) escape prison and go on the lam, robbing banks and getting famous in the process. As with much of Altman’s work, the scenario is only a framework, and appears to be of little actual interest to the director. Thieves Like Us is a day dream of tangible, dialed down, lived in little nuggets, a story of the life the idealized criminal lives in between the idealized portions.
As with most outlaw pictures, Thieves Like Us revels in a certain conflict of sympathy. We’re lured into rooting for Chicamaw and Co., despite the fact that Chicamaw is a remorseless killer, and that the other two have no real problem going along with it so long as it continues to pad their pockets. Many of these films have a more innocent criminal, perhaps the male embodiment of the hooker with the heart of gold cliché, and in this film that responsibility falls to Carradine.
Keith Carradine is an unusual presence of largely 1970s American films that I’m sad to see gone, he’s a rare specimen: a man of star charisma and fascination blessed with a character actor’s lack of baggage. As memorable as Carradine has been in many pictures, many of them by Altman, I find it nearly impossible to associate those parts with whichever part I’m watching him in at the moment. It’s insane and impressive to think that this is the same man who would play a callow, self-absorbed heartbreaker in Altman’s Nashville the following year, or that this is the same man who appears in the most terrifying scene of Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller a few years before, or that this is the man who would duel Harvey Keitel a few years after all of these.
Carradine has an eerie malleable child-like sensuality: it can be creepy and manipulative one moment, authentically naive the next; and that serves his Bowie well. Bowie is one of the more convincing criminal naïfs I’ve seen in a crime picture: he feels less like a device to divide our sympathy and more like the kind of authentic contradiction that can confuse and break a man, and that contradiction powers the poetic final few images of Thieves Like Us.
The entire picture is poetic though, this is one of the most sensual pictures Altman has ever made, and that is saying something. Thieves Like Us captures that hazy daydream of Southern summer that children who grew up in that part of America probably find themselves fantasizing about from time to time. The film, as I mentioned earlier, is about fantasy, idealization, but it also finds the day to day surreality that many viewers will be able to recognize as being in sync with their own lives. This consistent ability to merge the stylized with the day to day might be the key to Altman’s genius, and the very thing I spent many, many paragraphs laboring over in my Short Cuts review last week.
Because the plot doesn’t matter, it’s the little episodes of loneliness, love, and connection that people will hold from Thieves Like Us, the connective tissue fading into distant memory. Bowie’s lonely night under the bridge, using a dog as a blanket, will linger, just as how quickly he pretends to disregard that dog when it wanders away will linger. The men drawing straws to decide the getaway driver when they’ve already decided the getaway driver will linger. T-Dub’s vaguely incestuous, strangely innocent love for the sister of his brother’s wife will linger. The drunken pretend heist with children as extras will linger.
And Shelly Duvall will linger, this is perhaps, next to The Shining and Popeye, her strongest work, and most certainly her fullest collaboration with Altman. Her elusive thin vulnerable flaky quality compliments Carradine wonderfully, and when they exchange that Altmanish shorthand movie dialogue they appear to be sharing our deepest movie dreams of instant understanding and attraction. When they kiss and make love for the first time as a radio broadcast of Romeo and Juliet plays in the background (the radio is a constant wry comment of the overstatement of most grand on the run movies) you feel, in a way that romantic films rarely get across, the odd perfection of their union. Carradine and Duvall lend the picture its broken heart, which in turn imbues that painterly Altman atmosphere with meaning.
The film doesn’t have the raw genre force of a Bonnie and Clyde (though Chicamaw has his moments) nor is it meant to. This is the picture for people who watched Bonnie and Clyde, or Gun Crazy, and wanted more of the scenes between the lovers in the motels, wondering what they wonder. This is a picture for curious people who want just a little bit more from a familiar genre. Thieves Like Us is, in short, a picture for the Robert Altman fan.
★★★★
We Own the Night (2007)
We Own the Night opens on a somber collection of photographs that would be right at home in the opening credits of a 1970s Sidney Lumet film. From there, writer-director James Gray cuts, jarringly, to a very deliberate shot of Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix) walking down the hallway of a loft he has tucked away in the down town club he manages. At the end of that hallway lies a living room, and in that living room lies the luscious Amada (Eva Mendes). Bobby steals a bit of carnal respite before being called back to the front of the club to settle the sort of dispute that is obviously very usual-usual for him. We catch tantalizing glimpses of the sexy girls, the bartenders, and the clearly very dangerous clientele that frequents the place. Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” tells us it’s the 1980s, and a subtitle reinforces that just in case we missed it.
A few moments later, Bobby and Amada make their way to a celebration being held on the other side of town in honor of Capt. Joseph Grusinsky (Mark Wahlberg) who’s, I think, receiving a promotion. Presiding over the ceremony is Deputy Chief Albert Grusinsky (Robert Duvall), Joseph’s father and boss. The Grusinskys spot Bobby and quickly pull him away for a moment. It turns out that Bobby is Joseph’s brother and the long lost member of the Grusinsky family. The Grusinskys need Bobby’s help, a frequenter of the club is one of the deadliest drug runners in Brooklyn. Bobby, drunk, high on weed and vague self-loathing, tells his family to take a hike. Bobby feels a closer familial connection to Marat Buzhayev (Moni Moshonov) an older man who runs the club Bobby manages. The old man always happens to be related to the drug runner that Joseph and Albert hope to corner.
For about forty-five minutes, We Own the Night is tasty pulp, as breathless and obsessive as it sounds, and refreshingly old-fashioned. In a time of countless, ceaseless shaky-cam “excitement”, it’s nice to see a filmmaker who takes his time and actually builds a little steam before blowing the top off. That old fashion that I speak of also extends to the film’s look: lush and beautiful, the Brooklyn streets shot with the kind of painter’s eye that the David Cronenberg of Eastern Promises could appreciate.
We Own the Night comes down with a bad case of the “importants” about half-way through though, and the vitality seeps right out of the picture. The film primes you for a conflict between Bobby and Joseph, and between Bobby’s real and surrogate family, only to resolve that in a matter of minutes. The film primes you for one of Phoenix’s more interesting performances in years (where has the raw live-wire from Parenthood and To Die For gone?) only to revert to another one of his noble numbers that wins lots of nominations and little else.
Joaquin Phoenix is one of the strongest actors of his generation, but lately he’s been suffering from the same ennui tinged discombobulation that plagued Johnny Depp in the early 1990s before Ed Wood showed up. Bobby starts out a sexy, dangerous, kind of sluggish presence only to fall right in line when the you know what hits the fan. He’s ideal, upright, and dull as a damn fence post. Gray’s script is more consistent with the Duvall and Wahlberg roles, they’re dull from the very beginning.
I’m not going to dissuade you from seeing We Own the Night once, the film works when Gray isn’t smothering it with well meaning profundity. Gray turns out to be a virtuoso with violence, his gunplay is alive and terrifying in a way that the characters never quite manage. The best sequence, a claustrophobic highway ambush in the rain shot almost entirely from inside a character’s car, has the possibility of becoming classic, and proves that Gray has the stuff of a great filmmaker, when he isn’t going out of his way to prove he’s a great filmmaker.
★★½
Rants: Another Look at The Lookout (2007).
Re-watched Scott Frank’s The Lookout again last night. I wrote about this film in March, but a summer earthquake at BC somehow destroyed it. If I remember correctly I wrote that the film had a terrific first half followed by a second half that dampened the proceedings somewhat by being just ok.
I’m sticking to that. The first half is, if anything, even better than I initially wrote. Frank’s script is lean, mean and character heavy in equal measure, and he, in Joseph Gordon Levitt’s Chris Pratt, gives us a humdinger of a desperate noir hero. Brain damaged, self-loathing, perpetually suffering from shame and blue balls, this is definitely a guy you can see robbing a bank to get away, particuarly when charismatic weasel Gary Spargo (Mathew Goode) and the yummy Luvlee (Isla Fisher) get ahold of him.
The acting is superb. Levitt is one of the most exciting young actors of his generation. Unlike a certain overrated Ryan Gosling, Levitt doesn’t feel stifled and self-conscious: trying to convince you every moment of what a Great Actor he is. Levitt is authentically sensual, tortured and dangerous, particularly in this, Brick, and his brilliant career best work in the under appreciated Mysterious Skin. Mathew Goode, of Match Point, is just as startling here. The Likeable Villian is trickier than most acknowledge, you either go too likeable or too villian, but Frank and Goode handle Spargo’s seduction of Pratt confidently, convincingly, with tasty dialogue familiar to anyone who’s seen the Frank penned Out of Sight. Add Jeff Daniels doing another of his bitter beard numbers and you’ve got something with potential.
And the second half is fine. Just fine. But I don’t want to call it fine. I want to call it violent, pent up, deranged, sexy. I want the damn thing to come off the tracks, or be shaggier, less beholden to the framework of the classic noir story. Frank cares about his characters and that might be a bit of problem: he doesn’t want to put them through their paces. The end is safe and anti-climactic. A big build to, drumroll, just another bank robbery. Everyone who should die dies and everyone who should live lives.
Still worth seeing though, for the Swiss watch that is the opening two acts. I hope Frank gets behind the camera again soon and really takes his gifts for a spin.
Election (2005); Triad Election (2006)
Election and its sequel, Triad Election, have been playing in various festivals over the last few years, the buzz around them and their director, the prolific Johnny To, being considerably strong. The buzz is justified. Both films are tight, mean little gangster movies, and the now obligatory Faustian morality of the genre (still so overwhelmingly powerful in the first two Godfathers) works here too, because To isn’t trying to outdo Coppola in the Shakespearean grandeur department. To, like David Chase of The Sopranos, sees things more matter of factly.
The characters sell their souls for money and power, but it’s seen here as part of an inevitable process, an organic governing of society that involves the actual government, the triad (like our mafia) and assorted big businesses. The extinguishing of morality is viewed as evolutionary rather than tragic. To paraphrase a masterpiece that also happens to deal in inescapable corruption, To sees the future, though his films are quick to point out that the future, the past, and the present are inseparable.
At around 90 minutes and change each, you should just go for it and watch the Election films in a double bill, the majority of the stuff I just mentioned doesn’t come into play until the second, better, deeper film. Election is, inescapably, concerned with character introduction, we meet our various organizations and figure out the lay of the land as the forthcoming election for the Chairman of the Wo Sing Triad reaches its conclusion.
The election is meant to prevent violent upheavals in leadership, but I imagine you know how effective that turns out to be. The election of this first film is a close race between Lam Lok (Simon Yam), cold, calm, middle class, suburban looking, and Big D (Tony Leung Ka Fai) a dangerous hot head who resents the likelihood of finishing in second place. If you know your gangster movies, then you know Lok is the more dangerous, and this is confirmed beyond a shadow in the film’s abrupt, savage ending.
Election is a bit too dense for its own good. I hate to penalize films that make you work for the plot but I feel that it ultimately doesn’t benefit this film, particularly when compared to Triad Election. Election has a middle act that bogs down in the hunt for a relic that you don’t really care about, with convoluted loyalties that don’t ultimately add up to a whole lot; Triad Election is almost a horror film, following Jimmy (Louis Koo), a secondary character from the first film, as he takes on Lok for control of the triad. Where the first film feels cluttered, Triad Election is confident and more personal, detailing one person’s disintegrating integrity at a hushed, haunting distance. I know “distance” and “personal” don’t normally go hand in hand, but such is the strange tone that To works so well here.
This second film is also more violent and over the top, the lurid set pieces contributing to an escalating sense of a society reaching the brink of collapse, and being reigned back in by a larger structure of deeper corruption. Tradition, again, still turns out to be about who has the biggest stick. Several scenes should be mentioned, but let’s leave it at just one, that of several gangsters, in bizarre animal and clown masks that recall Kubrick’s The Killing, burying someone alive, the steady hum of a vent the only soundtrack. The broad arcs of gangster films are usually the same, it’s the bits of “business” in between that make or break them. Triad Election has enough great little vignettes of inhumanity for five pictures, but I’m going to let you discover the others for yourself.
Election : ★★★
Triad Election : ★★★½
No Country for Old Men (2007)
*This post discusses, to a certain extent, the ending of the film.
Anyone who goes to the movies as often as many of us do carries around, consciously or sub-consciously, an image of a “perfect movie.” Like addicts looking for their next fix, movie obsessives see, talk and write about virtually everything, and hope for the next film that perfectly, or nearly perfectly captures their inner idea of whatever kind of movie they happen to be seeing. I came across one of those films in 2004 in Sideways, a film that I loved intially and have continued to carry around since. Sideways is my idea of a perfect human comedy. I find every performance, every scene, every bit, to be graceful, warm, intelligent, and supremely moving. I came upon another of those films last year in Pan’s Labyrinth. If you’re really, really lucky, you get one maybe once a year, maybe one every other year.
This year that film is No Country for Old Men. This is the film that I hope for every time I walk into a thriller. The film, like many great films, feels inevitable. It seems that Tommy Lee Jones was always meant to play Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a variation on the creaky, no bullshit persona that Jones has been perfecting for the better part of twenty five years. It seems that Josh Brolin, always a badass, authoritative presence, was meant to embody Llewelyn Moss, a character that utilizes everything that Brolin brings to a film when he’s on. Brolin, like Jones, seems like he would be comfortable in another era of movies, which is another way of saying that he actually looks like a man. He keys into Moss’s desperation but still manages to be charismatic, likable even, without shortcoming the self-absorption of the character.
I can’t say that I guessed that Javier Bardem was meant to play a villain as iconic as Anton Chigurh, but I’m happy to be surprised. Bardem’s irrepressible charisma lightens what could be a problematic part. Chigurh isn’t a character but a Grand Literary Idea, and that can be impossible for even the swiftest of actors. Bardem is the Grim Reaper, the Typhoid Mary of the kind of apathy fueled corruption that is slowly eroding the society that Sheriff Bell may have not treasured (the film isn’t that sentimental) but at least understood.
Finally, the film feels inevitable for the Coen Brothers, who after some great films, some uneven films, and one bad one (I’m talking about O Brother, yes, I feel comfortable admitting I hate that well shot, God awful redneck boonie movie) have now made their best film. No Country for Old Men is based on a novel by the beloved Cormac McCarthy, but it feels as if it has always been in the back of the brothers’ heads, the film that has fueled their other tales of greed, death and corruption. Some have implied that No Country is the first Coen Brothers film to discard the snarky bullshit, but I disagree. Their brilliant Blood Simple (my favorite of the Coens films before this one) while playful, has a mournful quality. Fargo and the underappreciated The Man Who Wasn’t There may have that deadpan, vaguely postmodern thing going on, but they also deal in a bewilderment, an existential despair, that comes to the forefront in their new film.
I recently watched Melville’s Le Samourai for the first time. What is there to say about that film? It’s perfect. It elevates a very familiar story to the level of art in the precise brilliance of its execution. A similar thought occured to me as I was watching the long scene in the beginning of No Country for Old Men as Moss investigates the bizarre blood bath that he’s discovered while hunting. The scene plays much longer than most thrillers have accustomed us to expect, and is a nearly overpowering achievement in pure film craft. The scene, at the risk of overusing the word, is perfect.
If No Country for Old Men was merely a chase film between Moss and Chigurh, with Bell making an obligatory third act appearance similar to McDormand’s in Fargo, then the film would still be the best I’ve seen all year. The third act though, as you’ve no doubt heard, strives for something else entirely. We suddenly realize that the story we’re seeing is just another of Bell’s lost stories of inexplicable meanness and sadness, yet another reason why the lines of his face seem to cut so much deeper than anyone else, yet another reason why his eyes, while alive, seem to droop down to his chin. No Country for Old Men begins as a thriller and ends as an elusive ghost story. A mourning for something the characters don’t entirely understand to be missing to begin with.
As gracefully as the Coens handle the third act sigh that occurs in place of a climax, it’s the final scene between Chigurh and Moss’s wife, Carla Jean (Kelly McDonald) that elevates No Country for Old Men into the realm of shattering masterpiece. In this scene we realize that even Chigurh has a certain honor, actually more honor than Llewelyn, and that the final death would have been entirely avoidable. Chigurh’s line to Carla Jean, something along the lines of “He could have saved you but he chose to use you to save himself” is the stuff of nightmares. The next image, of Chigurh checking his boots, has the quiet, unlanced dread of the ending of the original The Vanishing. This image, more than many even good movies before it, drives home the price of greed, the cost of selling yourself to the highest bidder.
★★★★
American Gangster (2007)
Many directors would be lucky to have a picture like American Gangster under their belt. The film is, as typical with Ridley Scott, masterfully shot and orchestrated. This is a big, sprawling, satisfying tough guy movie. American Gangster is a cool flick, entertaining, and it’s a testament to the film that I already want to watch it again; particularly any moments with scene stealer Josh Brolin as Det. Trupo, a laughably obvious, corrupt glutton who hasn’t been fired yet because it would probably entail too much paper pushing.
That said, American Gangster, also like much of Scott’s work, feels distant. Scott has a background in advertising and photography and you feel that. Empathy doesn’t seem to be the man’s strong suit. Alien and Blade Runner are both considerable achievements, but they feel like a professor’s doctorate on the mechanics of their genres, not impassioned films that their creator HAD to make. American Gangster feels like Scott said, “Yeah, I haven’t made a gangster movie yet. Recreating 1970s Manhattan might be fun.”
And as impressive as that recreation may be, it has the subtlety of a wax museum exhibit. Scott’s 1970s inner city America, like many directors’ take on the decade, feels fetishy and not entirely authentic. The TVs play nothing but Vietnam updates, the streets are grimy, but PERFECTLY grimy. The detectives and the hoods look good, but too good, like the Mod Squad as re-envisioned by a certified Oscar nominated genius filmmaker. You may find yourself following suit and reacting in a similarly detached way: oh, that was a powerful scene, oh Washington exhibits quite a bit of menace here, etc. American Gangster doesn’t get under your skin and a film about a man smuggling heroin in the caskets of dead American soldiers should get under your skin.
Brian DePalma’s Scarface is too often mistaken for a great movie, but there’s no denying that it has a certain bugfuck gotta do it now or never insanity that’s impossible to forget. American Gangster, based on a fascinating true story, essentially has no point of view at all. I’m not really buying the point of view that has troubled some: that Scott and screenwriter Steven Zaillian are championing Frank Lucas’s (Washington) actions simply because he’s black and it represents a certain ironic affirmative action in a very lethal profession. The film has plenty of evidence that could be used in favor of that theory, but I don’t sense that Scott gives a damn one way or the other. He’s making Scarface without the fevered bloodlust, Heat without the existential despair, or Serpico without the impassioned outrage. Scott, as usual, is interested in a thoroughly researched, emotionally mute, time travel piece.
There are moments though, and the thing is phenemonally entertaining. Just as Scott is Scott, Washington and Crowe are Washington and Crowe. I would’ve liked a few more surprises from them, but they deliver “cool”, authoratative work that I’ll appeciate even more after a few beers while watching it the fifth time on TBS and boring my friends with a long winded something about what rarities Washington and Crowe truly are. One scene does stick though, Denzel, after lecturing his gang about the need to lie low, dares, once, to wear a gaudy coat as a gesture to his clueless wife, who bought it for him. This is the gesture, this one slip, that signals Denzel’s demise. For once, Scott briefly tunes into the human cost of long, protracted, merciless warfare.
★★★
Virginia Film Festival: Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)
Sidney Lumet is obviously known primarily for his New York crime films (Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Prince of the City, etc.) but something that runs through nearly all of his work, including other masterpieces such as The Verdict, or 12 Angry Men, is a generosity of spirit that is rare in any filmmaker, particularly American, particularly now. Lumet’s films take their time, his style is unfussy. Lumet lingers on the small moments between the bursts of profanity or violence, subtly insisting on the humanity of his characters, regardless of their actions. Look at the very long phone conversation between Al Pacino and his lover Chris Sarandon in Dog Day Afternoon, very few filmmakers would have let that scene go on so long, and they would’ve been cutting one of the best scenes of the movie in the process.
Sidney Lumet’s last picture, Find Me Guilty, signaled a minor return to critical favor. Again, the film is refreshingly deliberate, humane, funny, disciplined, but I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that Vin Diesel was miscast as the lead. I have no beef with Diesel, I recognize that he’s talented, but he’s too young for the part, and I never could quite suspend my disbelief. Alex Rocco is terrific in the movie though, and there’s several really good, typical to Lumet scenes, particularly an almost love scene between Diesel and Annabella Sciorra in his jail cell.
There’s nothing minor about Lumet’s new film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. This is that rare film that comes along hopefully at least once a year (last year it was Pan’s Labyrinth) where your over-tuned critic/snob faculties shut down almost immediately. Lumet grabs you by your collar, or, if you’re me, your sweater and says “we’re going for a ride, leave the all the other bullshit behind.” Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is the work of a major craftsman who’s at the height of his mojo; assured, confident, masterful, very nearly flawless, a perfect genre film that morphs into a spot on examination of the death of an American family.
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is notably meaner and nastier than the typical Lumet picture. It recalls the snakes of another Lumet classic,Network, only devoid of the conscience that William Holden at least partially represented in that film. Tellingly, the two most sympathetic characters in this new film are both women, and one is killed early on, and the other is marginalized as a sexual object and casually discarded. The characters of Devil are all dublicitous, or weak, or both, and this brings about a suspense that recalls Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, if everyone is bad then anyone can win. There’s no good guy here to ensure for us that the film will turn out a certain way. This is the Godless world of a very classic noir-crime film.
How interesting then that very little of the movie actually details the planning or execution of the robbery that powers the film. The plan is introduced early on, and the specifics are glossed over. This is primarily because the architect of the plan, Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is as uninterested in the specifics as we are. That’s Hank’s (Ethan Hawke) job, and Andy is so blunt and merciless with Hank that we feel that a sort of blackmail is taking place. Andy and Hank are brothers, and Andy, like many older brothers, is elusive and bossy, reveling in a command that’s more illusory than actual.
Many crime films, especially of the David Mamet variety, revel in the notion that no character is what they seem to be, and that every character acts different with every other character. That is also true of Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, but it’s not in the service of the crime portion of the story. The characters, particularly Andy, alter their behavior with each other as people do in real life, they put on guises that the social situation at hand demands. Watch Andy with Hank. Then consider the surprisingly tender post-coital scene between Andy and his wife, Gina (Marisa Tomei) that occurs near the beginning of the film.
Then consider the sex between them that jarringly opens the film. Then watch how Andy is around his father, Charles (Albert Finney), and how effortlessly he slides from self-loathing and insecurity to viciousness. Then pay attention to the scene between Andy and Gina that immediately follows in the car on the way home. It’s possibly the greatest scene in the movie, and the kind of scene, like the phone conversation in Dog Day Afternoon, that a lesser director may have cut for the sake of momentum. All of this is, again, a testament to the Lumet humanity that pervades even the more relentless of his pictures.
One could go on and on in this fashion. Marisa Tomei’s Gina, while largely played as a more vulnerable sex kitten, seems to actually be a statement on how men look at women that are as disarmingly attractive as she is. Tomei is not in the film much, but she’s in two of the most memorable scenes, the one already mentioned above, and another one, where it’s established just how far her concern for Andy reaches. Lumet plays our obsession with surface against us here, no way a woman who looks like Tomei could actually be interested in a man who looks like Hoffman for legitimate reasons right? Right? Maybe not, but maybe.
I went on a little bit about Philip Seymour Hoffman in my last post about his other starring role this year, The Savages. I had guilty knowledge when I proclaimed him the most exciting American actor in movies. I had seen The Savages, but I had also seen this film already, and Hoffman’s work in these two films is one of the most amazing one-two punches I’ve ever seen from an actor. Most are lucky to create characters like Andy and Jon in their entire career, much less the same year. Hank is a more malignant creation, but he’s a villain, like some of the Cagney characters, that you are tempted to cry for.
I rarely buy Ethan Hawke in anything, but he pulls off the most thankless part here in his best performance. Hawke’s Hank is the twitchy, cowardly, nervous character that most of these types of movies require to keep their engines turning, and Hawke plays a wonderful variation of it. I usually think of Ethan Hawke as too self-consciously “actorly”, but here he bravely plays a complete mess of a moron, a person who gets shit on by every other member of the cast.
Albert Finney’s portrayal of Charles is equally unforgiving: strong, minimal, and terrifying. Finney is really beginning to show his age, and Lumet concentrates on the crinkles and crags in his face. This is a portrait of the benevolent old man as a thin mask of need, of vulnerability, and, when provoked, of boundless vengeance.
When a director as famous as Sidney Lumet makes a film this good, it’s tempting to give him most of the credit behind the screen, but it should also be said that newcomer Kelly Masterson has made a striking debut with the film’s screenplay. I look forward to future work from him.*
A month or so ago, I said I was tempted to call The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford a masterpiece, but would wait and let the years decide. I’ll take the bait this time, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is a masterpiece.
★★★★
*Yes, this passage has been changed around a bit. K. Masterson understands men so well because he is, in fact, a guy. I couldn’t find much on him at the time, and I made an assumption based on the name, my apologies.
Gone Baby Gone (2007)
Gone Baby Gone is, as the title partially suggests, another “our collective mistrust, guilt and secret hatred as crystallized by the disappearance of an innocent” picture. This one is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, who inspired another entry in the genre, Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River. You’ve no doubt heard that Ben Affleck served as director and co-screenwriter of Gone Baby Gone, and, if you havent seen the film yet, or read some of the positive notices, you can probably be forgiven for assuming this film is a desperate vanity project, or, best case, merely forgettable.
Gone Baby Gone is a memorable, confident picture and refreshingly lacks the lifeless “Great American Director” self-importance that killed Mystic River. Affleck has made a tasty little detective story with a strong moral outrage that sticks. Most private eye pictures (and I say this as a fan of the genre) revel in the anti-social cool of their protagonist. The PI has been fucked over several times in the past and he knows the score, and the films are usually about him lording his street smarts (whether he knows the full story or not) over every other character in the movie.
Gone Baby Gone is about that initial fucking over that sours the PI to begin with, and it’s about struggling to maintain a sense of balance and optimism in an environment that discourages such ambitions. Some have mumbled “too young” in regards to Casey Affleck’s Patrick Kenzie, but that is precisely the point. He IS too young, but the film’s course of events probably ensure that he will one day be giving some other young do gooder the advice that Ed Harris (doing a particularly effective variation of his thing) and his partner (nice to see you back John Ashton) give him here. Kenzie is a tricky part, it’s tempting to make him an insufferable bore, but luckily both Afflecks understand that to navigate this world, optimism or not, you still to have some inner savage.
Affleck the director acknowledges this in a wonderful scene near the beginning when Affleck the actor and his partner, Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan, regrettably marginalized) begin to look into the case of a young neighborhood girl that has gone missing. They stop by a bar that the mother (Amy Ryan) is known to frequent, well, frequently. They immediately find something the cops have missed. Someone begins to talk, and a few other someones in the bar begin to resent this. Ben Affleck stages the scene with authority and surprising quicksilver viciousness. Most surprising is Casey Affleck, his Kenzie isn’t the pretty boy his looks may lead one to believe. He’s an emotionally stewed pit bull, and he’ll snap at someone twice his size, and be the first to pull a gun.
Emotionally stewed, constipated, tortured, none of that would do Amy Ryan’s performance justice. Ryan’s Helene McCready is one of the more lived in creations of bottom dweller desperation and self-loathing that I’ve seen in the movies. It’s exhilaratingly unsentimental work. McCready is the sort of the casual monster that is much more dangerous than the barroom thuggery that Patrick fruitlessly confronts; McCready represents something more insidious, and impossible to supress. MCready’s casual obscenity, her unflagging sense of reckless, unsubstantiated entitlement, her self-absorption, her fleeting moments of clarity, it’s all remarkably realized by Ryan. Many films have acknowledged the chicken and egg business of broken homes, or abusive, unstable families; but most are unable to avoid sanctimony as gracefully as Ryan and Affleck do here.
The naivete that goes with attempting to interrupt the endless cycle of people screwing one another over is the ultimate punchline of Gone Baby Gone. The film has a broken heart, and it drives it home in an ending so powerful you forget for a few hours how deeply absurd it actually is. The film depends on a few unlikely realizations that recall some of the last act convolutions of Mystic River, and Affleck’s film gets vague just when it should be snapping into focus. Affleck hasn’t made a great film, but he’s made a good one, a genre film with snap and conscience, a requiem for giving a damn.
★★★
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