Out of the Furnace

OUT OF THE FURNACE                  B-       

USA  Great Britain  (116 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Scott Cooper

Having only made two films, it’s hard not to compare, as Cooper’s first feature CRAZY HEART (2009) took the cinema world by storm, a small gem of a story about the hard life on the country music circuit told with an aching authenticity, winning a Best Actor award for Jeff Bridges, who also sings the Oscar winning Best Song.  Changing directions here, a more grim and downbeat story, Cooper has chosen a distinctly working class American mill town in Pennsylvania steel country, where jobs are scarce and sympathy is non-existent.  Everybody does what they can in this environment, receiving few accolades or rewards in life.  Reminiscent of films like TWICE IN A LIFETIME (1985) or THE DEER HUNTER (1978), which Cooper pays a distinct homage to, these films have a connection to the land upon which they’re based, where untold stories of hardship speak to settings like Braddock, Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh, an area that was part of an economic boom in the 50’s and 60’s when American steel mills were at their peak.  But today the population is around 2100, where the dual economic downturns of the 80’s when the blast furnaces closed and then again in 2009 when the foreclosure disaster took the life blood out of these towns, leaving boarded-up houses, vacant lots, and enormous rusted out and decaying mill structures still standing, now seen as eyesores on the desolate urban landscape.  While there is a closing credit:  This film was shot entirely and proudly on Kodak film, it’s been strangely transformed to digital, giving it a grainy and processed look instead of something more natural, as if the humanity has been squeezed right out of the film itself.  Opening and closing to Eddie Vedder singing Pearl Jam songs, which you’d think would be a perfect blue collar fit for a modern era ghost town, but the director indicated he felt Vedder’s voice could be overpowering, taking the focus away from what’s presented onscreen, so he chose Tindersticks’ guitarist Dickon Hinchliffe to score the film.     

Almost like chapter sequences, one by one the main characters are introduced, including Woody Harrelson as Harlan DeGroat, an out of control, hillbilly shitkicker who’s always hopped up on crystal meth, Christian Bale as Russell Baze, one of the men working in the mill, and his brother Rodney (Casey Affleck), who refuses to go anywhere near the place, choosing any other way to make a living, an Army veteran serving several tour of duties in Iraq.  Russell has a happy relationship going with a local grade school teacher Lena, Zoë Soldana, while also helping to look after his elderly and seriously ill father, along with his Uncle Red, Sam Shepard.  This close family unit and deranged outsider are destined to meet at some point, but not until much later in the film.  Bale’s Russell couldn’t be more understated, a man of few words, but loyal and outwardly friendly, where he’s seen as a good man that bad things happen to, one of the victims of the economic crunch, where he’s continually bailing out his brother’s debts to the local bookie, Willem DaFoe as John Petty, who keeps an office in the back of the local saloon.  It’s after having a drink with Petty that Russell has a deadly car accident killing several people, including a small boy, sending him off to several years in prison (in the gothic confines of the West Virginia State Penitentiary in Moundsville, operating from 1867 to 1995).  Lena refuses to experience the grim prison reality, but Rodney keeps his brother appraised of life on the outside, including the eventual death of his father.  By the time he gets out, Lena has left him for the local police chief (Forest Whitaker), leaving an emptiness in his life that seemingly can’t be filled.  But he doesn’t go get drunk or do something drastic, he just feels the solitude of being alone, where he remains emotionally imprisoned even though he’s back on the outside.  This is perhaps best expressed in a deer hunting scene where he and Uncle Red head out into the forest, where he quietly comes upon a male buck, but hesitates to shoot, as he hasn’t the heart to kill anymore after killing two innocent people. 

Meanwhile, Rodney does under-the-table, bare knuckle fights (instead of Christopher Walken’s Russian roulette), which is how he pays off some of his debts to Petty, a kind of repugnant way of making a buck, often returning battered and bruised, reminiscent of the excellent Walter Hill Depression movie with Charles Bronson, HARD TIMES (1975), who makes a living the same way.  Tired of nickel and dime fights, however, Rodney demands some real action from Petty, something that will pay off his entire debt and actually get him somewhere.  Warned repeatedly about how savage these men are up in the Appalachians, described as “inbred mountain folk from Jersey,” some of whom never come down off that mountain, nonetheless Rodney forces his hand.  The parallel aerial views of the drives to the fight scene and the deer hunt are carefully choreographed, leaving no question that the hunt is on, one animal and the other human, both equally barbaric and ferocious when seen from the view of the one being hunted.  These primitive practices stand at the center of what was once a proud and thriving city, now economically stripped to the bone where savagery rules.  It’s here that Masanobu Takayanagi’s darkened, washed out cinematography becomes truly hideous, as Harlan DeGroat represents the scum of the earth, the very worst of America, where violence is a blood sport, with bodies left buried somewhere in the woods never to be seen again, with the police nowhere to be found.  When Rodney turns up missing, this pits Russell against the police chief, the guy who stole his girl, further angered at the apparent inaction of the police, where there’s a moral void at the center of the absence of responsibility.  It’s not just the ominous music of the Tindersticks that this film shares, but also the bleak, atmospheric portrait of an isolated, mountain society from Debra Granik’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #3 Winter's Bone (2010), which shows us part of the closed-off economic devastation we rarely see.  Despite the influence of Leonardo DiCaprio and Ridley Scott as high-priced producers, and superb performances from the leads, what’s missing is a more closely observed script, co-written by Cooper and Brad Ingelsby, completely lacking the focus and meticulous detail of Granik’s backwoods portrait of rural America, which utilized locals in the cast.  Instead what we get is a weary and worn out America, tired of sacrificing so much for this country, and getting so little back in return, as Eddie Vedder sings an updated version of Pearl Jam’s “Release” Pearl Jam - Release from the dvd "The kids are twenty" - YouTube (4:44) over the end credits.

The Hunter (Skekarchi)

THE HUNTER (Skekarchi)        B                   

Iran  Germany  (92 mi)  2010  d:  Rafi Pitts  

Whenever there is a country under political turmoil where suppressing freedom of speech is an issue, it’s easy for the West to read into it what they want to believe, often making exaggerated claims of political ramifications, or offering overpraise.  Filmmakers in Iran have been dancing around this issue for decades, usually writing in code or metaphor, developing allegorical storytelling, where the government since the 1979 Islamic Revolution has simply not allowed open criticism or dissenting point of views from their artists.  Perhaps the greatest name in Iranian cinema is Abbas Kiarostami, one of the few working directors who remained in Iran after the Revolution, developing a naturalistic style of cinema stripped of all artifice, often using children or stories of ordinary life focusing on the intimacy of the human condition.  Kiarostami’s keen intellect and poetic powers of observation have always risen above the political realm.  Rafi Pitts, on the other hand, spent his childhood in Tehran, but moved to England with his family as a young teenager during the Iran/Iraq conflict, educated in the West, eventually working with filmmakers in Paris, where his outsider filmmaking style is a hybrid of dueling cultures.  What sets this film apart from other Iranian films is its prolific use of Western genre styles, while also offering an unusual ambiguity, almost refusing to reveal pertinent plot details, becoming an odd modernist take on what it’s like to live in Iran today.  Pitts has a daring artistic style, which is evident during the opening credit sequence, a kind of blurred, painterly montage set to blaring heavy metal rock music, before it comes to rest upon an infamous 1980 archival photo taken by Manoocher Deghati of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard in full motorcycle regalia, celebrating the first anniversary of the Revolution as they’re about to drive over an American flag painted on the street, which is followed by the title.  Make of it what you will, but it certainly sets the tone for what follows. 

Pitts seemingly divides his film in half, where the opening sequences are filmed in Tehran, something of a concrete jungle, seen as a series of interconnecting highways, each one loaded to capacity with speeding cars dizzyingly moving back and forth in a rather pointless use of one’s time, isolated from the real world, nearly invisible behind an everpresent toxic sheen of smog that bleaches out all color, leaving only the briefest outlines of a city landscape.  Pitts himself plays the lead character, nearly wordlessly throughout, apparently a last minute fill-in for someone who didn’t show up to work on time.  There is a heavy reliance on an automobile, like 70’s cult flicks VANISHING POINT (1971), TWO-LANED BLACKTOP (1972), or THE DRIVER (1978), where this one similarly features multiple shots of a car zooming through various tunnels, getting groomed in an automatic car wash, driven by an urban loner who works the midnight shift as a night watchman, unable to work the dayshift, apparently, due to his ex-con background.  So he lives a solitary life largely excluded from his wife and young daughter, seen together only briefly before they mysteriously disappear, where he can be seen futilely searching the streets and hospitals, apparently hiding the truth from his mother (the director’s own mother), when he excuses their absence during a planned visit for his daughter’s birthday.  Later he’s told by the police they were accidentally killed in a shootout between police and demonstrators in the lead up to the 2009 Presidential election, news that seems to light a fuse of inner rage.  Grabbing his rifle, which we’ve seen him use for hunting in earlier scenes, he uses it this time for target practice, picking off two police officers in a random act of retaliatory violence, quickly fleeing the scene.

In a soupy fog, the car can be seen racing through back highways and small country roads, chased by a swarm of police cars after him, where he eventually slides off the side of the road in a hairpin turn and crashes his car, retreating into the forest where he’s quickly apprehended by two uniformed officers.  Strangely, the entire focus of the film shifts as the police lose all sense of direction in the dense forest, where the two police officers start arguing among themselves, both angrily making accusations, blaming the other for their unfortunate predicament, made even worse by a steady downpour of rain.  This turns into an existential power struggle with these two guys at each other’s throats, with all sense of morality lost and adrift in the serene beauty of the woods, beautifully shot by cinematographer Mohammad Davudi, where the prisoner is nothing more than dead weight, extraneous baggage to carry, where he may as well already be dead, according to one officer, already labeling him a cop-killer.  This turns into an eerie chamber drama between the three characters, where the wordless prisoner is like a blank wall reflecting the attitudes back onto the other two, where each grows more suspicious of the other, descending into a hellish cesspool of contempt and disgust, where their inner rage seems to parallel the criminal mentality of the prisoner, showing how easily people can lose their bearings.  The natural environment provides no more sanctuary than the urban jungle, each one just as indifferent, where by the end all three are mere skeletons of their former selves, veering into George Romero zombie territory where one wonders what will be left of the last traces of humanity.  While offering occasional stylistic flourishes, the film is entertaining enough, but remains overly ambiguous and slight, offering hints rather than real observations, led by a murky character we never come to identify with, leaving instead the alienated impression of a Stranger in a Strange Land.  The film is dedicated to another Iranian exile, author Bozorg Alavi, who left Iran in the U.S. led 1953 military coup d’etat that brought the Shah to power, whose 1952 short story Gileh Mard (The Man from Gilan) inspired the film.     

Drive

DRIVE             B+      

USA  (100 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d:  Nicolas Winding Refn

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, winner of Best Director for this film at Cannes, takes a break from his more violently exotic PUSHER Trilogy (1996 – 2005) and takes a stab at an American mixture of commercial and art motif with this homage to the existential car films of the 1970’s like VANISHING POINT and TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (both 1971), or Walter Hill’s THE DRIVER (1978), where what each have in common with this film are the extraordinary specialized skills of the mechanic and guy behind the wheel, where the open road seen ahead is the only freedom he’ll ever know.  It’s also impossible not to think of Steve McQueen in BULLIT (1968), the personification of cool behind the wheel, transplanted to Ryan Gosling here (originally slated for Hugh Jackman), known only as the Driver, a wordless guy with steely nerves, a Zen calmness, but also a capability for savage violence.  The love affair with the automobile is established right away as the Driver gets a couple of crooks out of a tough jam, evading the police with an eerie kind of expertise, a brilliant sequence that sets the tone for the rest of the movie, opening a window into his world, luring the audience into a fascination with his profession.   The real film this resembles, however, is To Live and Die in LA (1985), as both show a seethingly corrupt film noir underworld in the city of Angels, both expertly establish a high throttle tension throughout, both straddle the line between law abiding and law breaking, and both have inspired musical soundtracks, where Cliff Martinez creates a Tangerine Dream-style synth score, featuring a wall to wall, techno-pop, sound effect of angelic romantic choruses that couldn’t be more hypnotically appealing.  The artistic design of the film has a sleek, classical elegance, where the constantly moving digital cameras from cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel offer the viewer a roller coaster ride, where the pauses allow you a chance to look around for a moment before they start rolling again. The mounting tension is unsurpassed in any other recent film, creating a palm sweating, edge-of-your-seat visceral experience that is nothing less than superb.  That said, the storyline by Hossein Amini adapting the James Sallis novella here, who also wrote the superb Thomas Hardy gut-wrenching movie adaptation of Michael Winterbottom’s JUDE (1996), feels very sleight in comparison.       

Gosling’s Driver establishes the interior tone behind the wheel, a MAD MAX (1979) style lone wolf on the prowl in the wasteland of an urban jungle, a guy that doesn’t set his heights too high, but his expertise as a professional stunt driver for the movies is so noteworthy that it’s impossible for others not to notice.  He moonlights as a driver for hire, an escape artist, no questions asked, no talking to the cops, just a guy who excels behind the wheel.  "I drive.  That's all I do."  The titillated novelty here is the barebones thread of a budding romance with one of his neighbors, Carey Mulligan as Irene, a single mom raising her young son alone while his dad is in prison.  Their first date is a return road trip to the cement canal dry riverbed waterways of a chase sequence in To Live and Die in LA, this time seen through a much softer, romantic prism, a gentle and poetic moment that feels like an oasis in the desert, as much of the rest of the film is filled with bloodlust and revenge.  Despite the hyper violent edge, the actual moments of screen time violence are far less than most all Hollywood thrillers, amounting to just a few minutes of the entire film, but the extreme stylization is so enigmatic that the effect is more memorable and long-lasting.  This is an inevitable heist gone wrong film, where the Driver just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, as the people he’s mixed up with don’t realize they’re stealing the mob’s money, which means there’s hell to pay.  The vicious turn of events are brilliantly executed, where Gosling is mesmerizing with his cool demeanor, rising above his double-crossing cohorts with minimal sweat, or so it seems, able to stare death in the face even as he’s being targeted.  The quick decisive action of the mob is alarming, showing extreme brutality, but Gosling keeps his wits about him, where one wonders just what kind of trouble he may have faced before, questions that remain unanswered.                  

When did Albert Brooks, creator of his own strange and quirky comedies of the 80’s and 90’s and the voice of Nemo’s neurotic Dad in Disney’s FINDING NEMO (2003), become a gangland boss?  Did we miss something?  Here’s a guy that cast Debbie Reynolds as his own mom in MOTHER (1996), for Christ’s sake, so when did this transition occur?  Was it the slimy character he played in Soderbergh’s OUT OF SIGHT (1998), the guy that risked his girl friend’s life rather than give up the hidden diamonds?  Was it his role as a Dick Cheney-style government bureaucrat gone mad in THE SIMPSON’S MOVIE (2007)?  Whatever happened from his days at Saturday Night Live, the guy now plays a terrific heavy, as he’s the face of the mob boss here, given some highly colorful, profanity laden dialogue that seems to resurrect his memory as a once proficient hit man rising up the ranks, where the guy loves to be warm and fuzzy, but can’t afford mistakes or any loose ends in his line of business, which makes his end of it very personal.  The film is very much style over substance, despite the terrific performances all around, as there’s little to no social commentary and an ambiguous moral dilemma that has little to do with anyone's life.  It’s the love element that tips the audience in favor of the Driver, as he’s cool and collected but falls for the girl, even as her life gets exasperatingly complicated when her husband is released from prison.  Still, the inevitable showdown is between two guys outside the reach of the law, both brutally efficient, where no one can really call either one a winner, as there’s too much psychological baggage to carry.  Refn uses a very compact, highly constricted style that energizes his work, creating an extremely taut and gripping drama, something one movie executive character ironically describes in the Sallis book as:  “Think Virginia Woolf with dead bodies and car chases.”