WE OWN THE NIGHT

(James Gray, 2007)

James Gray's third film as writer-director, We Own the Night, feels generally a little too familiar. It covers territory audiences know well from a clutch of other films - New York Cops hunting down a drug ring, a man caught between friends and family, loyalty, violence, the dark streets of the American city in the past three decades, guilt, justice, revenge. You've seen it all before. You've seen it a few time sin the last decade, in fact. You've seen American Gangster or The Departed. We Own the Night is like a younger brother to those two films - its stars are less starry, its director less of a name, its budget and running time obviously less inflated.
Gray is a true auteur - he has written and directed each of his films, and they share his thematic concerns. He is interested in family, in violence, in guilt and responsibility. He is a gifted director. Each of the films is directed with a confidence and inventiveness that is remarkably assured. The problem seems to lie with his writing, which can be uneven. He writes some beautiful scenes - sparkling dialogue and powerful emotions brought to the surface, realistically and painfully - but also some real clunkers. The plotting - particularly in We Own the Night- can seem horribly second-hand and derivative. When in doubt, resort to violence, seems to be Gray's way. But his characters can ground the films with their painful dilemmas, each of them conflicted and agonised by their lives.
What is most distinctive is Gray's seriousness. Each of his films is sombre and darkly atmospheric, intent on its own little tragedy. The Yards seems bent on turning itself into a mini-Godfather with its seeming mission to look like a John Alton-shot film noir in colour and its operatic heights of tension and release. Indeed, each of his films is beautifully lensed, and Gray deserves praise for his classicism, his determination to shoot films uncorrupted by modern editing styles and lighting techniques. It gives his work a timeless look, warm and lived-in yet never shrinking from the grubbiness of the urban underbelly they observe. His skill as a director is most apparent in the impact each of his set-pieces delivers. We Own the Night, for instance, delivers a couple of stunning scenes. The first, a deafening, bloody police raid on a drug factory in a tenement building, is preceded by an equally impressive build-up of tension as one character feels that exposure as a police mole is close. The second is a car chase along a highway in a rainstorm. Here Gray's cutting and shot choice is exemplary yet never predictable, keeping the scene exciting yet intimate, horrific and convincingly confusing as it is. The film's finale - a bracingly suspenseful and visceral pursuit on foot through a field of reeds - is another example of his gift for set-pieces, as is the central fist-fight in The Yards, perhaps the most realistic ever put on film. He is adept at evoking clammy fear, the dread of discovery, the adrenaline of sudden violence, always a you-are-there feeling of inhabiting a scene, perhaps because his approach to such scenes is always fresh and different.
Despite all this the best scene in We Own the Night is the opening credits. I say "credits" although there are none. The movie's title is only visible as part of a badge in one of the photos making up the opening photo montage. This montage is composed entirely of period photos of NYC police at work - and a few evocative crime scene shots - from the 70s or early 80s. These photographs tell their own vivid and intriguing tales, with the faces looking out from some of them, the perfectly captured moments of real life, real police, real criminals, drug paraphernalia. You can almost smell some of the rooms, the stink of sweat and cigarettes. The photos are all black & white, full of subtly textured greys, and reminiscent in many cases of the work of legendary crime scene photographer Weegee. An instrumental, loungey lite-jazz reading of "I'll Be Seeing You" by Jackie Gleason's Orchestra plays over the top, its elegiac sadness counterpointing the bleak starkness of some of the images. Its a strangely potent sequence, and a reminder of the unequivocal power of the still photograph to capture an instant. It sets an aesthetic standard the rest of the film has significant trouble reaching, though Gray and his excellent cast give it a good go.

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES

(Derek Cianfrance, 2012)

Long, slow, sombre and oh-so serious, Cianfrance's film is the sort of old-fashioned grand American filmmaking many assume no longer exists. It is also immensely flawed, though the strength of its directors bold style and commanding technique obscures this to a large extent.
A mightily ambitious family saga with touches of melodrama and crime in its DNA, it begins with Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), a stunt motorbike rider at a travelling carnival who is approached upon his return to an upstate New York town by a local girl with whom he once had a fling. Romena (Eva Mendes) had his baby, and once she lets him know, his wandering days end, and he sticks around, falling in with Ben Mendelsohn's scuzzy mechanic and causing trouble for just about everyone. That trouble eventually crosses the line into outright criminality, and the consequences of his actions effect local cop Avery (Bradley Cooper), who is struggling with the corruption around him and his own issues with his father and wife (Rose Byrne). The connection between these two men is echoed years later when their sons meet by chance.
The kind of ambition Cianfrance shows here is a gamble. While it may be impressive in its own right - not many young directors have such reach or even understand how to conjure up the sort of intensity The Place Beyond The Pines frequently manages - it demands an exceptional level of talent to deliver an end product worthy of it's loftier goals.
Cianfrance is undoubtedly a talent. He has a fine eye and infuses scenes with an arty sense of personality, a coherent and distinctly individual view of the world which gives his film a haunted, emotional quality which makes it seem more interesting than it actually is. The problem then is that his central thesis here - the evil that men do, basically - is such a watery one that it renders his film little more than a torrid, extremely male melodrama. It plays not unlike the work of James Gray, only lacking his sense of intelligence and some of the complexity his work evinces.
It has a strong ensemble, but a couple of the actors are lazily cast. Gosling, for instance, plays Gosling, more avatar than character, all wardrobe choices (inside-out t-shirts), constant cigarette and pout. He poses better than any other actor currently alive, and does a sort of method angst, but he is superficial here, at best. Then there is Ray Liotta, here playing a corrupt, strangely menacing Cop, whose nature we understand almost as soon as we see his face.
Faring best is Bradley Cooper in a tricky role. His cocksure smirk is wiped away by the plot here, and the sweaty anxiety which replaces it makes of him a far more compelling figure.
What we are left with, then, is a good tale, quite well told. If only it hadn't presented itself as so much more.

HOLY MOTORS

(Leos Carax, 2012) In a former life and almost two decades ago Leos Carax was the enfant terrible of French cinema. He was also a dazzlingly talented and ambitious young director. And then, following the failure of his underrated Melville adaptation Pola X in 1999, he stopped working. In the 13 years since there has only been a single chapter in the portmanteau film Tokyo, starring Carax's old cinematic surrogate, Denis Lavant as the bizarre, sewer-dwelling, shambling, flower-eating goblin known, seemingly, as "Merde". Well, now Carax is back. And so is Merde. He is one of the many identities assumed by Lavant's Monsieur Oscar in Carax's wild and baffling comeback movie, Holy Motors. Oscar is being driven around Paris in a white stretch limo to a series of appointments, for each of which he must adopt a different persona. In the limo he dons make-up, changes costume and tries on different wigs before slipping into a series of different scenarios. As Merde he terrorises a cemetery before kidnapping a model (Eva Mendes) in the middle of a fashion shoot. In another "appointment", he dons a motion capture suit, then performs a set of shadow-boxing-cum-dance-routine moves which are then turned into a cgi dragon-mutant sex scene. In another he is a concerned father picking up his teen daughter from a party. And an assassin executing a banker (also played by Lavant) outside a restaurant. An old man on his deathbed. A man reunited briefly with an old flame (Kylie Minogue). In between these scenes it is never entirely clear what else is "real", what is "performance", as the whole thing operates under something resembling dream logic. There is a musical interlude where Lavant leads a band heavy on accordions around the interior of a Cathedral. Lavant twice appears to murder himself. A boss appears to scold him about possible slipped standards. Some appointments seem to bleed into his own life in the back of the limo as he becomes tired and drunk. The encounter with Minogue begins like a chance meeting before - perhaps - transforming into something else. What it all means is the question many viewers will come away wrestling with, and it is one of the film's strengths that there are so many possible readings; it seems to be about the nature of cinema itself, and our relationship with it, about performance and the meaning of acting, about life in this era of rapid technological change, about mortality and death. It is a rich, baggy film, crammed with lovely moments and fascinating details, heavy with allusion and references. Though a couple of the appointments may stretch viewer patience - the nature of Holy Motors courting artificiality as a theme means that it struggles at a few crucial moments to earn any emotional response - it is entertaining and energetic throughout. Carax's direction is a lot less flashy than it was at his peak, but his confidence gives the film a steady rhythm and solidity which works well given the fantastic subject matter, and he retains his powerful eye. There is also a sort of joy here, joy in the glory of cinema itself, its ability to conjure up a world, a mood, an emotion in an instant of sound and image. Each of Carax's worlds here is precisely evoked, the emotion skewered within seconds. A couple of the episodes necessarily stand out; Merde and his encounter with Mendes is quite unforgettable in its combination of comedy, creepiness and strong visuals, and Minogue's melancholy song in the wreckage of a closed Department store is moving and oddly beautiful. But really, each of them contributes something to the overall mood, each of them helps make Holy Motors work, helps make it the unique beast it is. It feels at times like an attempt to sum up modern cinema, as if it was trying to include a little bit of everything, and only narrowly failing. Unique it most certainly is; I have literally never seen another film like it.