The Family

What is that which gives me joy? Gangster roles!

Grade: B+

Director: Luc Besson

Starring: Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tommy Lee Jones, Dianna Agron and John D’Leo

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 52 min.

One scene binds the satirical layers of French director Luc Besson’s The Family. Playing a former Brooklyn mob boss now posing as a writer under federal witness protection in a remote village in northwest France, Robert De Niro is invited to a gathering of the town’s local film society. When the night’s original featured film, Some Came Running, falls through, its replacement is another distinctly American film from “Monsieur Scorsese.” And so we see an aging De Niro, the flicker of a film projector haloing his head, smiling wryly at the opening moments of Goodfellas.

Here, Besson encapsulates the whole of his adaptation of Tonino Benacquista’s novel “Malavita.” First, the film is an elegy to the glorified American movie gangster, embodied in the visage of a goodfella who didn’t stay on top or die living the life, but instead chose to snitch on his mob family in order to save his real family and now wiles away his later years in foreign exile. Indeed, it’s not a stretch to analogize De Niro’s Giovanni Manzoni—living under the assumed name Fred Blake—to Henry Hill about 16 years after the end of Goodfellas.

The film also spotlights the French’s simultaneous abhorrence of Americans and adoration of American culture. When the Blakes host a cookout, the neighbors line up to sample hamburgers and other American cuisine, while at the same time snobbishly sniffing at Fred’s attempts to ignite his charcoal grill. When Fred’s wife Maggie (Michelle Pfeiffer) dares ask a local grocer if he stocks peanut butter, the faux pas is met with a string of whispered insults that Maggie answers by blowing up the store.

Beyond the provocative allegory, what keeps the film entertaining is its knowing casting and its breezy, offbeat comedic script. While the Blake clan may have moved overseas, they brought their mob mentality with them. Normandy is only the latest landing spot for Fred, who has been uprooted by his federal minder Robert Stansfield (Tommy Lee Jones) several times due to Fred’s anger issues. Warren (John D’Leo) is a hustler in training who begins working the angles the first day at his new high school. Meanwhile, teenage daughter Belle (Dianna Agron, a long way from Glee) is an acute mix of her mother’s beauty and her father’s hair-trigger temper.

There’s a subplot involving Fred’s investigation into local water supply (perhaps a nod to Chinatown), as well as his attempt at writing his memoirs using an old Brother typewriter, an endeavor dissuaded by Stansfield. Even a seemingly throwaway aside by Warren about the varied uses of the f-word is slyly revisited following a film-ending cataclysm.

It’s no secret that Besson’s films, and the Cinéma du look French film movement he helped form, are heavily influenced by New Hollywood cinema and modern Hollywood action movies. In this way, The Family—particularly its violent final act—is also Besson’s sardonic response to the longstanding criticism that his work is too slick, commercial and “Hollywood,” lodged by countrymen harboring their own predilection for Yankee pop culture.

Public Enemies

You look real good. Now, let me know when
a plot bubbles to the surface.

Grade: B

Director: Michael Mann

Starring: Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, and Billy Crudup

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hours, 20 minutes

It is an endless source of fascination that in our pop-culture ethos, renowned criminals are memorialized while those who bring them to justice are either forgotten or vilified. The history of cinema is littered with films that venerate the likes of Al Capone, Billy the Kid, Bonnie & Clyde, Butch Cassidy, Bugsy Siegel, and even serial killers like the Son of Sam and the Zodiac Killer. On the other hand, lawmen like Pat and Buck Garrett, Bill Tilghman, Bat Masterson, and Delf “Jelly” Bryce are forgotten figures, and film treatments of Wyatt Earp (who was, in fact, a sketchy character) and Eliot Ness are rare exceptions to the rule.

The title of director Michael Mann’s Public Enemies may as well be The Story of John Dillinger. Set in the 1930s, it follows Dillinger (Johnny Depp) during his string of notorious bank robberies, gunfights, and jailhouse escapes alongside fellow miscreants Baby Face Nelson, John “Red” Hamilton, and Homer Van Meter. Equal time is also devoted to Dillinger’s relationship with his torch singer-moll, Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard).

Following the formula of Heat, his superb 1995 crime drama, Mann juxtaposes lawmen with their lawless quarry, separating them by the thinnest of moral dividing lines – indeed, the film’s title eventually assumes a dilogical air. Here, Christian Bale plays Walter Purvis, the G-Man assigned by Bureau of Investigation head J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup, superb) with the task of tracking and apprehending/killing Dillinger and his cohorts. Dillinger is cast as a violent, cunning criminal, but also a public-relations conscious celebrity keenly aware and proud of his Robin Hood popularity among the Depression-era public. He guns down lawmen to facilitate his dark deeds but eschews suggestions that he expand his enterprise into kidnapping for ransom, surmising that the public would not support such crimes, thereby jeopardizing his reputation and ability to essentially hide in plain sight from the authorities.

Purvis, on the other hand, is a straitlaced ramrod dedicated to bringing his dangerous prey to justice. However, under instructions from a fanatical Hoover to “take the white gloves off,” his G-men often shoot first (often in the back or on crowded city streets) and ask questions later. There is obvious zeitgeist when the “enhanced techniques” federal agents utilize during a brutal interrogation of Frechette nets only false information as to Dillinger’s whereabouts. (And, there’s also obvious and hokey sanctification when Purvis arrives to halt her torture and literally carry her to use the bathroom.)

Mann indulges in procedural glitz from the film’s taut opening sequence, rendering his action set pieces in exhausting, often splendid detail. He has elevated the cinematic firefight to the level of high art, and while many directors shirk from shooting at night, Mann and his new-found penchant for high-definition filmmaking revels in them (as he did in Collateral, Miami Vice, and the final act of Heat). Of note, his recreation of the shootout at the Little Bohemia Lodge, shot on location in Wisconsin, is masterful.

What keeps Public Enemies from approaching the level of masterpiece is a peculiar lack of emotional accessibility to the key characters. This is partly the fault of the filmmaker and partly attributable to the actors. Bale never strays from the no-nonsense lawman, while Depp, in particular, plays Dillinger with a detached sense of aloof calm, rarely cracking his visage to reveal any tumult brewing underneath (a scene when he witnesses the arrest of Frechette being the lone welcome exception).

At the same time, Mann ignores opportunities to explore his subjects’ psyche. Although the majority of the film is notable for its historical accuracy, Mann overlooks the crude, botched plastic surgery Dillinger underwent two months before his death, a potential interpretative device for illustrating the increasingly desperate robber’s growing isolation from his public, his friends, and even the Chicago crime syndicate that once harbored him but now regarded Dillinger and his attention-grabbing ilk as a lightning rod for meddling by federal authorities and lawmakers. Instead, Mann concocts a mildly amusing but obvious scene in which, on the eve of his death, a merely bespectacled and mustached Dillinger strolls into the Chicago police squad room dedicated to his capture, even stopping to ask agents hovering around a radio the score of the Cubs baseball game.

Public Enemies is less a biopic than a glossy, stylish elegy. However, the film ultimately informs us more about Mann’s craftsmanship than the doomed Dillinger – or the men who fell him.

Neil Morris

Gomorrah

Say hello to my little friends...

Grade: C +

Director: Matteo Garrone

Starring: Salvatore Abruzzese, Gianfelice Imparto, Maria Nazionale, Carmine Paternoster, Salvatore Cantalupo, and Toni Servillo

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hours, 15 minutes

The opening scene of the Italian neo-gangster film Gomorrah encapsulates everything that is good and, ultimately, wanting in this critically acclaimed picture. As Mafiosos relax in a tanning salon, a group of rival gangsters stroll in, issue a few pleasantries to their brethren in crime, and then suddenly gun them down, leaving the dead mobsters bloody and baking in their UV rays.

As the film’s title card bursts onto the screen, the viewer’s interest is piqued by questions generated from years spent watching movies of this ilk. Who are the gunmen? Why did they kill the other gangsters? How will this episode eventually fit into the film’s primary storyline? Surprisingly – and unfortunately – only the first question is answered. Gomorrah is adapted from a book by writer and journalist Roberto Saviano that exposes the powerful, Neapolitan crime syndicate known as Camorra. Saviano has suffered threats on his life as a result of his revelations, and his prose reflects the deadly serious subject-matter.

Director Matteo Garrone extends Saviano’s realist approach to the big screen, crafting a narrative that is gritty and ferociously cynical. Incorporating an Altman-esque approach (think Nashville and Short Cuts), the movie oscillates between five separate storylines (only two appreciably intersect) about Italians affected by organized crime. In one, two brash wannabes named Marco and Ciro steal a hidden cache of Camorra weapons. The hapless duo spends the remainder of the film blithely firing off their guns, robbing a casino, and spouting off loose quotations from the movie Scarface. The casual insertion of Brian De Palma’s kitschy classic, canonical in gangsta rap culture, drives home Garrone’s goal of deglamorizing both the real-life mob lifestyle and the gangster film genre. Indeed, it is telling that Garrone does not spotlight the gangsters themselves, but rather the (quasi-)innocents embroiled in a web of dystopic iniquity.

However, in his attempt to redefine mob movies, Garrone eschews many of the qualities that make such cinema interesting and tantalizing. Garrone focuses so squarely on sin that he forgets it is often the sinners who lure moviegoers looking to be both informed and entertained. For instance, in one thread we periodically visit Roberto (Carmine Paternoster), a recent graduate working in that old standby, waste management, who watches as his mob-connected boss illegally dumps toxic chemicals in disused mines. Roberto’s character arc remains flat throughout, serving merely as a conduit of disgust over his boss’ actions.

In another subplot, a timid mob bagman (Gianfelice Imparto) walks a tightrope between feuding clan factions, each trying to exploit him for their own aims. A 13-year-old boy named Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese), who longs for acceptance into a gang, looks on as violence envelopes and destroys those around him. And, ultimately, Marco and Ciro are just a couple of knuckleheads who stupidly overstep their bounds.

In trying to squeeze in as many slices of life affected by Camorra, Garrone creates a diffuse narrative that reserves little of its 135-minute running time for developing an innovative plot or provocative, fascinating characters. The lone exception is the tale of Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo), a haute couture tailor who spends nights secretly training Chinese sweatshop workers in the art of sewing knockoffs in violation of his competing, Camorra-controlled employer. The intrigue in this storyline does not extend beyond the first time we witness Pasquale’s Chinese handlers ferry him to his moonlight job in the trunk of their car, fearful of mafia reprisals. However, Pasquale’s eventually exodus from the dangers of the mob world is tinged with both relief and melancholy: He leaves a life once full of promise for one of safety and security.

Much the same can be said about a film full of thematic import that, stylistically speaking, takes the easy way out. A good filmmaker knows how to sell the sizzle and the steak, and Gomorrah could have used a lot less tumid monotony and a lot more Tony Montana.

Neil Morris

Gran Torino

Shhh...I think I hear Charlie in the bush

Grade: C +

Director: Clint Eastwood

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Bee Vang, Christopher Carley, Ahney Her, and Brian Haley

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 56 minutes

As an actor, Clint Eastwood is the most distinctly American film icon since John Wayne. As a director, Eastwood's films succeed (if at all) in spite of a languid, vastly overrated filmmaking style that his devotees continue to blindly deify, the same deference again being afforded Woody Allen now that he has churned out a couple of decent films this century. Few directors can beat thematically rich material into such frothy, underperforming meringue like Eastwood – Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Mystic River, Changeling, and his 2006 World War II double-bill of Faith of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima are several of his most recent transgressions.

Gran Torino aims to be the same requiem for Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callahan doppelganger that Unforgiven fancied itself as for his Westerns. Literal translation: Eastwood plays an older version of same characters inhabiting those earlier films. Here, he is Walt Kowalski, a recently widowed Korean war vet and retired auto worker who wiles away his twilight days rocking on the front porch of his Detroit home, swilling beer and waving his M-1 rifle at anyone who ventures too close to his property line. He also aims ire at his feckless family (Because they're spoiled? Because they don't like the fact that he's an insufferable coot? Because they didn't fight in a war? Because they weren't directly spawned by the Greatest Generation? Who knows...) and a fresh-faced local Catholic priest (Christopher Carley) who hopes to salvage Walt's eternal soul before the Grim Reaper finally comes calling (the same religious debate waged in Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby).

However, Walt saves his harshest anger for the changing face of his Highland Park neighborhood, particularly the Hmong family that moved in next door. One night, the family's youngest son, Thao (Bee Yang), and a local Asian street gang try to steal Walt's prized 1972 Gran Torino before Walt interrupts and chases them away. A contrite Thao is forced to work off his moral debt to Walt, and in the process Walt becomes exposed to his family, including his sassy older sister, Sue (Ahney Her).

The message of tolerance supposedly at the heart of Gran Torino proves as much a mirage as the pro-feminist lacquer coating the misogynistic Million Dollar Baby and shallow anti-violence posturing of the ultra-violent Unforgiven. After Walt stands up to the Asian delinquents, his female Hmong neighbors lay rewards at the doorstep of their white champion even as he smears them as "fishheads" and "slopes" to their faces. Indeed, Walt spends the majority of the film spewing racial invectives like "chinks," "beaner," "gook," and "spooks" (the conspicuous absence of the n-word is indicative of the film's underlying phoniness.)

Writer Nick Schenk draws a subtle-as-a-sledgehammer parallel between the Asian influx into Walt's neighborhood and the Asian takeover of an automobile industry once dominated by Detroit's Big 3 automakers (and embodied by muscle cars like Ford's Gran Torino), and from that Eastwood posits a wider commentary on the lament of lost Americana. However, Eastwood goes several steps further, including scenes in which Walt trades casual barbs with his Italian barber, glares at lowriding Latinos, and confronts a group of black thugs threatening to rape a young girl (and this being Eastwood's nihilistic universe, the Asian bangers eventually do) while challenging a white teen sporting a blackcent to start acting his own race.

The debate is not whether Eastwood's depiction of multicultural decadence is accurate or exaggerated (the answer depends on one's world-view and environment). The real question is Eastwood's purpose behind the breadth of his portrayal, especially since he never exposes Walt – coarse language aside – as anything but wise and heroic. In this regard, Gran Torino is less an elegy for Harry Callahan than Eastwood's personal interpretation of The Searchers. But, unlike Ethan Edwards' awakening in John Ford's epic, the tonal shifts in Walt's character, particularly during the film's final act, feel contrived without the careful groundwork that Eastwood the filmmaker fails to lay.

In the end, a young Asian rides off into the sunset literally and figuratively embracing the American iconography gifted by his white benefactor. He gets a car; Eastwood just takes the rest of us for a ride.

Neil Morris

American Gangster

Here's the deal - I tell you what I know, and
you and Ridley let me be in "Gladiator 2"

Grade: B -
Starring: Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Josh Brolin, and Lymari Nadal
Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hours, 37 minutes

Although officially helmed by Ridley Scott, American Gangster plays like the Antoine Fuqua-directed version that never got past pre-production: solid but stolid, honest but derivative, and involving yet indolent. In essence, it is a portrait of contrasts, not merely between its two protagonists but the two halves matted together to create a watchable but unoriginal whole.

It is not just that Denzel Washington channels his ablest incarnation yet of the Training Day/Malcolm X amalgam he regularly regurgitates nowadays, or that Russell Crowe’s Serpico-redux turns in $1 million in found drug money rather than share it with cops-on-the-take who consequently turn against him. The real plagiarism is a story arc that mimics everything from Scarface to Superfly to The Godfather without injecting any artistry or dramatic tension.

Washington plays Frank Lucas, a North Carolina native who in the 1960s moved to New York City where he studied at the feet of infamous Harlem crime boss “Bumpy” Johnson. After Bumpy’s death, Lucas assumes his mentor’s mantle by mounting a drug empire around smuggling pure heroin from Southeast Asia into the U.S. in the coffins of dead American servicemen killed in the Vietnam War. Along the way, Lucas rules his kingdom with an iron hand and cocked gun, warding off threats from rival mob bosses, crooked cops, and ultimately police detective Richie Roberts (Crowe) and his handpicked anti-narcotics squad.

The by-the-numbers script from writer Steven Zaillian vacillates between Lucas and Roberts using parallel storylines. The ironic plot hook, we quickly learn, is that Lucas is a ruthless criminal who loves and cares for his family – most of whom he moves from North Carolina to join his nefarious enterprise – while Roberts is a straight-shooting cop whose personal life comprises a broken marriage, deficient fatherhood, and wandering eye.

The basic problems are two-fold. First, this is fundamentally Frank Lucas’ story, and every minute spent focused on Roberts’ backstory feels like filler, however compelling it might be unto itself. Second is the derivative quality of the Lucas treatment: so little time is devoted or usefully spent on Lucas that we are only left with the bare prerequisites of a docudrama about a Harlem Scarface or Godfather – a violent outburst here, an attempt on his life there, etc. Nary an eyebrow is raised inside or out of Lucas’ inner-circle when he beds and weds a Puerto Rican Beauty Queen during the early 1970s, while the talent of Chewitel Ejiofor is squandered in an underdeveloped role as one of Frank’s younger brothers.

When the narrative orbits of Lucas and Roberts finally intersect, the result is a glossy, almost giddy final act that is tonally out of sync with the rest of the film. In a moment that should wallow in Lucas’ comeuppance, Scott attempts to elevate him to the status of folk hero.

Although generally entertaining, there is a perfunctory, workmanlike air hovering around American Gangster that keeps it from attaining the lofty designs it clearly desires. Then again, the last movie costarring both Denzel and Crowe was Virtuosity, so at least this is an improvement.

Neil Morris