Tag Archives: Roger Deakins

Homicide

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Homicide movie poster

 

Detec­tive Bobby Gold (Joe Man­tegna) comes to see him­self as torn between two dis­crete worlds in David Mamet’s Homi­cide (1991). Only when maneu­vered into a posi­tion in which he must choose, the dual­ity unrav­els and he finds he is no one spe­cial and belongs nowhere in particular.

Gold’s part­ner Sul­li­van (William H. Macy) has an unre­served man-crush on him, tak­ing every oppor­tu­nity to pub­licly but­ter him up and extol the ther­a­peu­tic plea­sures of police work. He reminds their peers that his revered part­ner is “Bobby The Ora­tor,” so-called for his skill at nego­ti­a­tion. Indeed the moniker is deserv­ing, for he is called on to calm a rabid dog with mere words, and later sweet-talk a fero­ciously stub­born mother into betray­ing her son. But Gold is cer­tainly no action hero, con­firmed in a early scene as he is beaten up and dis­armed by an over­weight civil­ian, in the sanc­tu­ary of the police sta­tion. By the end of the film, he has lost his sidearm a sec­ond time and is quickly phys­i­cally bested again by the crook Ran­dolph (Ving Rhames). Is it too much of a stretch to link his fail­ure to con­trol his weapon with impo­tence and cas­tra­tion? He cer­tainly feels per­pet­u­ally aggrieved. At each unfair turn in these very unfair events, he repeats his refrain: “What did I ever do to you?”

William H. Macy and Joe Mantegna in Homicide“You got some heavy trou­bles on your mind? Huh, babe? We’ll work it out. We’ll play some cops and rob­bers. We’ll bust this big crim­i­nal. We’ll swag­ger around.”

Bobby acci­den­tally comes across a seem­ingly mun­dane mur­der while chas­ing down the sex­ier Ran­dolph case (the kind of unam­bigu­ous, action-packed police work, with mea­sur­able results, that grants Gold and Sul­li­van exis­ten­tial sat­is­fac­tion). Elderly Jew­ish woman Mrs. Klein has been found mur­dered in her inner-city candy shop. Every­thing points to a sim­ple rob­bery, “every­thing” being, of course, the sup­po­si­tion that poor neigh­bor­hood African Amer­i­cans have robbed a rare white busi­ness. Klein’s son, not quite griev­ing but resigned to a life­time of per­se­cu­tion, sighs “It never ends.” When Bobby asks “What never ends?”, grand­daugh­ter (Rebecca Pigeon) coldly clar­i­fies for him: “On the jews.” Already the mur­der esca­lates from a rob­bery to a hate crime, and this is a strong whiff of cat­nip for a man who also believes him­self to be per­pet­u­ally put-upon and aggrieved. As the Klein fam­ily cor­rectly infers, Bobby is a Jew. But he wears a 5-point star as a cop. His sub­li­mated Jew­ish pride only comes out in defense against the occa­sional pro­fes­sional flare-up in which he is called a “kike.”

Fit­tingly for a detec­tive cel­e­brated for a mas­tery of words, pur­su­ing the Klein mur­der case is more an act of lit­er­ary schol­ar­ship than one of police pro­ce­dure. Gold’s inves­ti­ga­tion brings him to a Jew­ish research library where he senses deeper mys­ter­ies encoded in his ances­tral Yid­dish. His sin­gle best clue is the tan­ta­liz­ing deriva­tion of the nonsense-seeming word “Gro­fatz.” All of this leads him into a con­fronta­tion with a decades-old group of Zion­ist war­riors (who may be or may not be the Mossad, although the name is not men­tioned in the film) who awaken him to his venge­ful Jew­ish iden­tity. Hun­gry for the rush of pos­i­tive action that his cop side is cur­rently deny­ing him, he elbows his way into their ranks and becomes addicted to vio­lent action.

Rebecca Pigeon in Homicide“Hey, you’re bet­ter than an aquar­ium, you know that? There’s some­thing hap­pen­ing with you every minute.”

But Homi­cide is a policier on the sur­face only. Like most of Mamet’s plays and screen­plays, the plot is struc­tured around a deep, com­plex con­fi­dence game. House of Games, The Span­ish Pris­oner, Glen­garry Glen Ross (read The Dork Report review), Spar­tan, and Red­belt (read The Dork Report review) all fea­ture a long con of one form or another at their cores. A sucker is a sucker because of the tru­ism that if one looks hard enough for some­thing, one will find it. Most of Gold’s appar­ent clues and leads evap­o­rate into mean­ing­less hap­pen­stance. What is at stake is not what he thinks, and he finds him­self used and abandoned.

Spe­cial men­tion goes to fine cin­e­matog­ra­phy by the great Roger Deakins. The decay­ing Bal­ti­more pro­vides for two spec­tac­u­lar chase scenes, one along the rooftops and another below the asphalt. Each coils into a labyrinth, spi­ral­ing down and in, deeper and deeper, until Bobby encoun­ters phys­i­cally pow­er­less but immov­able minotaur-like fig­ures the dis­armed man must bat­tle with his words alone.

Must read: Homi­cide: What Are You, Then? by Stu­art Klawans

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

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The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

 

Had I seen The Assas­si­na­tion of Jesse James by the Cow­ard Robert Ford ear­lier, I might have included it among my Most Dis­ap­point­ing Films of 2007. Cer­tainly not because it’s “bad,” for could I make a bet­ter movie myself? Could I make a movie at all? And who appointed me a critic, any­way? But this blog is about my per­sonal reac­tions to movies, so here goes. Assas­si­na­tion was praised to the high heav­ens by pub­li­ca­tions includ­ing Dork Report favorite Sight & Sound, so I had expected it to be one of the year’s gems. And indeed, the act­ing is excel­lent and the cin­e­matog­ra­phy breath­tak­ing. But I would describe the movie as “nov­el­is­tic,” not nec­es­sar­ily a good thing with cin­ema, as opposed to, you know, novels.

Assas­si­na­tion no doubt inher­ited its notably slow pace (not a prob­lem for me) from its source mate­r­ial, the novel by Ron Hansen. I haven’t read it, but I sus­pect my own chief com­plaint like­wise derives from the book: the omni­scient nar­ra­tion. I’m not one that thinks voiceover nar­ra­tion is a screenwriter’s crutch to be avoided at all costs, but there are two extremes in which it can be mis­used: to redun­dantly expli­cate the action seen on screen or to impart infor­ma­tion bet­ter shown that told. The Assas­si­na­tion of Jesse James does both. I wish I had made a note of an exam­ple or two, but there are numer­ous instances of nar­ra­tion that could sim­ply have been cut for not adding any­thing to what we’re watch­ing onscreen at the moment. But on the oppo­site end of the spec­trum, one of the most sig­nif­i­cant events of the story, Ford’s ulti­mate dis­il­lu­sion­ment with James and deci­sion to betray him to the law, hap­pens off­screen and is offhand­edly recounted by the nar­ra­tor. Ford approach­ing the author­i­ties to become a crim­i­nal infor­mant would have made for a dra­matic scene.

Brad Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert FordThrough amber fields of grain

Although the pair­ing is not quite fair, I am I huge fan of the HBO series Dead­wood and couldn’t help but com­pare the two in my head. Please set aside for a moment the only roughly related set­tings (Dead­wood is set in 1870s South Dakota, and Assas­si­na­tion in 1882 Mis­souri) and bear with me for a moment. Most obvi­ously, actor Gar­ret Dil­lahunt appears in both. Dil­lahunt may have been type­cast as a 19th Cen­tury sort, but his char­ac­ters could not be more dif­fer­ent. The Fran­cis Wol­cott of Dead­wood is an edu­cated, urbane, and yet dan­ger­ously per­verted early Mas­ter of the Uni­verse, a far cry from the sui­ci­dally igno­rant Ed Miller in Assas­si­na­tion. But where the two diverge, and Dead­wood cer­tainly pre­vails, is the dia­logue. David Milch’s script­ing is the kind of aston­ish­ingly pro­fane poetry that might result when char­ac­ters with Vic­to­rian edu­ca­tions find them­selves liv­ing in the ass-end of the world. I found myself spoiled by my mem­o­ries of the prematurely-cancelled Dead­wood, and wished Assas­si­na­tion had a lit­tle more of its poetry.

But enough grip­ing — time for the praise! Roger Deakin’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy is deli­cious, full of warm oranges and deep unbro­ken fields of black. A notable visual effect used to open new chap­ters in the story is a nar­row field of focus with a blurry halo, sug­gest­ing old daguer­rotypes (sim­i­lar to what I’ve seen recently in The Illu­sion­ist). Dork Report guest critic Snark­bait chris­tened the effect “Ye Old Timey Fil­ter No. 4,” but accord­ing to an inter­view with Deakins in Amer­i­can Cin­e­matog­ra­pher, the fil­ter is his own inven­tion and appro­pri­ately called the Deakinizer.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert FordThe James Gang in hap­pier days

There is fine act­ing all around, and two fun cameos from James Carville and Nick Cave (who cowrote the film’s music). Casey Affleck rounds out an excel­lent year in his career after Gone Baby Gone with a great per­for­mance as Robert Ford, obvi­ously not billed above Brad Pitt but arguably the main char­ac­ter. Sam Rock­well (as Charley Ford) is espe­cially great near the end of the film, as his simple-minded char­ac­ter trag­i­cally breaks down. Pitt makes a charm­ing and earthy, yet plainly socio­pathic Jesse James. James’ curse is that he’s always the smartest man in the room, but one need only wit­ness the par­tic­u­larly unhinged laugh Pitt gives him to see how lunatic and crim­i­nal the man actu­ally is.

I lied, one more com­plaint: Mary-Louise Parker & Zooey Deschanel, both fine, name actors, appear in minia­ture roles with min­i­mal dia­logue. Per­haps their char­ac­ters were sim­i­larly minor in the orig­i­nal novel, but they seem under­served in the film. Per­haps the female pres­ence in the actual lives of these his­tor­i­cal fig­ures was not sig­nif­i­cant, but to return to Dead­wood for a moment, Dead­wood repeat­edly proved it is not his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ism to include women in a modern-day por­trait of a bygone era.

Offi­cial movie site: jessejamesmovie.warnerbros.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.