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.

LONE SURVIVOR

(Peter Berg, 2013)

America: Fuck Yeah!
Four heroic Navy SEALs on a recon mission in Afghanistan find themselves caught in open ground by multiple Taliban fighters. Without access to communications and with nowhere to run, they begin a desperate rearguard action, killing dozens of enemy soldiers. But they are whittled down gradually until only one remains...
Reminiscent of Ridley Scott's superior Black Hawk Down, this a a combat movie that sentimentalises the band of brothers at its heart while turning the faceless enemy combatants into little better than 1st person shooter video game cannon fodder. That is, when the enemy is not being identified as evil Taliban leadership, responsible directly for the deaths of US soldiers. Berg isn't interested in the politics or morals of the conflict in Afghanistan, and so he reduces it to a jingoistic claptrap of black and white, good versus evil.
In this case the good are represented by American movie stars: Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster (the standout) play the four SEALs, with Eric Bana their commanding officer. Berg knows what he's doing and the battle scenes here are ferocious, and crucially always maintain some spatial coherence - you know exactly where everybody is in relation to everybody else, despite all the gunfire and explosions.
Documentary footage over the opening credits shows how tough SEAL training is and that should serve as a warning of sorts - these men (literally) jump off two cliffs as part of their retreat, and this film is really as much of a gruelling survival ordeal as it is a War movie. The cast are fine, the script efficient but hideously bombastic - Afghans die rapidly, meaninglessly, one after another. Each American death, meanwhile, is underlined somehow; in slow motion, given a heavy musical backing, crosscut with another event: these men are HEROES, and don't you forget it, son.
It works if you like that sort of thing, I guess.

TED

(Seth MacFarlane, 2012) A lonely young boy wishes that his Teddy Bear could speak so that they could be best friends forever, and overnight, his wish is made real. Twenty years later, after a flush of 1980s celebrity has faded, boy has become thirtysomething slacker John Bennett (Mark Wahlberg) while bear has matured into foul-mouthed pothead Ted (a seamless piece of cgi animation, nicely voiced by director MacFarlane), sharing an apartment with John's beautiful, successful girlfriend Lori (Mila Kunis). Lori wants John to grow up and get serious about his life and their relationship, but Ted makes that more or less impossible. Then there is the disturbed fan (Giovanni Ribisi) seemingly determined to make Ted his own... MacFarlane can tell a joke, and perhaps the best thing about Ted is its relentless stream of gags he maintains unflaggingly. There are all sorts of gags, too; verbal riffs on pop culture and human behaviour, slapstick, visual jokes, homages to various movies (most obviously Mike Hodges' Flash Gordon), an amusing VoiceOver... In sharp contrast, the narrative here is utterly predictable, following the template of a thousand rom-coms in its treatment of the story of the man child driven to maturity (eventually) by almost losing the woman he loves. Kunis is beautiful and charming in that role, but the part is an embarrassing, misogynist cliche; all Lori does for the majority of the film is nag and make demands of John before her climactic realisation of what is really important. Ted is cheerfully un-PC in it's humour, and the range of targets is wide. These gags are racist, sexist, xenophobic, and often downright hateful in their nastiness. But it's just that quality that gives the movie an edge that works against the fuzzy softness of the narrative. Wahlberg works too, his essentially game likeableness put to good use here. MacFarlane's direction - a couple of inspired pastiches of 80s cliches aside - is efficient, and no more. Problematic and disposable, then, but it is also, on occasion, extremely funny.

CONTRABAND

(Baltasar Kormákur, 2012)

Mark Wahlberg's stock screen persona differs little from his offscreen persona; lying somewhere between Jason Statham and James Cagney, he generally plays an honest, blue collar tough guy who has to be driven to violence, but excels at it when that occurs.
Contraband is really no different. Wahlberg plays Chris Farraday, an expert smuggler gone straight who is dragged back into "the life" by the stupidity of his young brother-in-law, who finds himself in debt to some bad people after a run goes wrong. To pay the debt and get some lowlifes (led by Giovanni Ribisi) off his back, Farraday takes on one last run, bringing him to Panama and into contact with some dangerous Latin gangs, all while his wife (Kate Beckinsale) and two little boys are left at home in New Orleans, somewhat at the mercy of the criminal elements newly reinterested in his business.
All of that is terribly stale; familiar elements rearranged into a slightly different order. The plot is overly complex, with the Panamanian excursion in particular turning into an overstuffed - if entertaining - series of suspense and action beats one after another, including a Double-cross, a massive gun battle and a race against time, all of it presided over by Diego Luna chewing scenery as a deranged Gang chief.
The script has a few good lines and no interesting characters, but Baltasar Kormákur's direction enriches it somewhat; he keeps it grungey, gritty and grainy, thick with atmosphere and dense with texture. This is a portrayal of a New Orleans seldom seen in cinema, and Panama city registers vividly in that passage too, while life aboard a colossal cargo ship is pungently rendered, all cheap, scuffed carpets and oily corridors.
Contraband is best appreciated for its exemplary collection of shifty, distinctive character actors in the supporting and villain roles, modelling various brands of facial hair and sneer; from Ribisi and Luna to the ever-reliable Ben Foster and J.K Simmons, together with Lukas Haas and Caleb Landry Jones. They, far more than Wahlberg and Beckinsale, its star turns, mean that it's rarely boring, even at its most predictable and derivative.

THREE KINGS

(David O.Russell, 1999)

David O. Russell's Three Kings is an unashamedly political film. Russell benefitted from several years of hindsight in his treatment of the first Gulf War. He could more or less say what he liked about it, so his film is highly critical of that Bush Government's treatment of Iraqi rebels who rose up against Saddam when it became apparent that he was losing the War. But Russell was savvy in his criticism - he veiled it in a terrific action comedy which felt, at the time, unlike just about anything else anyone was doing. Indeed, watching the film now it looks like a masterpiece of sorts. It has aged extremely well.
In recent years, American cinema has profited handsomely from the collision of Indie creativity with Studio money. Russell is a great example of this faustian phenomenon. His debut, Spanking the Monkey is a sweatily well-observed, pitch black incest comedy, made for not a lot of money. He followed it with the broader Flirting With Disaster for Miramax, but despite the presence of bigger not-quite stars (Ben Stiller, Tea Leoni) his work managed to retain some of its independent edge. Its there in the off-centre characterisation, the portrayal of America as a zoo for neurotics of various shades. Three Kings is something else entirely. A mega-budget semi-Blockbuster with some rising stars and the backing of one of the big studios in Warner Bros, it asked a lot of a young Indie director. But it was worthwhile. His film manages to feel like a big action movie with an indie sensibility, a fairly unique beast.
Early on, everything is comic. That first shot of featureless desert horizon punctured by the incongruously surreal vision of a young Iraqi waving a white cloth from atop a small bunker/hill, the helmet of a US soldier in the bottom corner of the frame; sets the tone as just slighty askew. This is not how big studio War movies start. That this movie will be different is only underlined by its first dialogue, beginning an instant later, and shouted across the desert floor, a dunderheaded, repetitious exchange between grunts, part Beckett, part Abbott & Costello.
Russell treats the grunts with a cynical detachment - he likes his heroes, you feel, but he is aware that they are all flawed individuals. His montage of their victory celebration paints them as jingoistic, meathead fratboys, a depiction much of the remainder of the film works hard to balance. Even so, there is something of the Coens in his sensibility, the notion that he feels somewhat superior to his characters and periodically cannot resist patronising them, even sneering at their idiocies. The conversation about "perfectly good substitutes" for racial terms of abuse for Iraqis is a good example. Russell was clever enough to cast likeable actors, however, and his film is structured cunningly so that the action and drama kicks in suddenly, and the audience is dragged along with the narrative's momentum, the heroes abruptly established as such.
The comedy, while it lasts, is a mixture of effects. Russell uses whatever may produce a laugh: slapstick, satire, sight gags and funny dialogue all feature. This is a film which depicts an exploding cow, while also featuring a character mistake bullion for "them little cubes you put in hot water to make soup" and employing a sudden, and frankly, quite brilliant cut to Chicago's "If You Leave Me now" in the tense preamble to an action sequence. Russell makes it all work, and it makes the film feel richer, more electric.
If Three Kings has a direct ancestor, it is Kelly's Heroes, Brian G. Hutton's 1970 Clint Eastwood vehicle about a heist by a platoon of GIs in Nazi-controlled Italy. That too was an action-comedy, though it entirely lacked any political dimension and it's action was far tamer than Russell's. He had never directed action before, and as a result those sequences are often sloppy and obviously the work of a director new to this type of material. And yet this inexperience is a boon - the action scenes are entirely lacking in the baggage of a seasoned pro, they seem almost to come without influences. As a result they feel fresh, with more impact and resonance than most action scenes. Russell signals his intentions with the early scene in which Clooney explains how a bullet can cause sepsis and the camera zips into and out of a body like an invisible scalpel, capturing the spurt of bile from a ruptured organ from the inside. Russell takes this violence seriously, it seems, he feels every bullet, and he seems determined to ensure that audiences do too. This pays off later when we see the anatomy of the escalation of the initial gunfight, the camera woozily cutting and panning across the spaces between combatants as a domino effect of thunderous shots and visceral impacts pulses through a town square, leaving men dead. Later on, characters we care about will be shot, even die, and Russell wants us to feel that too, to see the lunacy of it all.
Stylistically, the film is mainly handheld, giving it a jittery immediacy. The colours are washed out, bleached by the desert sun, most obviously in the earlier scenes. This over-exposed look has been much imitated since. Russell also indulges in some strange, almost disturbing frame compositions, and makes a few references to other movies - that first action scene is notable for its self-consciously posed close-ups of Clooney and Ice Cube, filtered light discolouring them, clouds streaming by unnaturally fast overhead. These shots seem like ultra-pop homages to Sergio Leone (which makes sense, given the duel that has just occurred) , and stand out because they are so different to the way the rest of the film is shot. Is Russell underlining that this is the moment priorities changed for these men, or ironically mocking their own possible self-images as bad-ass American fighting men? The way Russell portrays Clooney's character as a cool customer throughout, the latter suggestion seems unlikely. He gives the men credit for following their consciences, the poor treatment afforded to Iraqi villagers snapping them out of their greed and forcing them to intervene. Here he sets the standard so many later Iraq films cling to - he lauds the men on the ground while attacking the politicians. But this is not a simple issue and Russell does not avoid its complexity, either. He makes it clear that these men are conflicted about helping the rebels in the longer term, beyond the initial situation in the town square. Indeed, they are more or less blackmailed into lending aid after their own lives have been saved. Wahlberg's character emerges from a torture-and-lecture session with more empathy for everybody - he is in severe shock - and falls in line with the others, who have all seen the light during their journey. At the end, the Rebels and their safe passage seems more important to the men than the gold. Of course Russell undercuts this with the final hint that even then, some of the gold was looted.
Much of the political context is made explicit in the dialogue. The film has an entire subplot about one Reporter searching for a story amidst a sea of reporters earching for stories, and indeed begins and ends with TV news report footage. As if that was too subtle, a character says "This is a media War" at one point. Clooney refers to "Bush" with a near-visible sneer, and uses him as a figurehead, with great irony, in his speech to rouse rebellion : "God bless America and God bless a free Iraq!" The speech fails, a possible allusion to the co-opting of American patriotism together with Iraqi nationalism. Clooney's superior, played by a brusque Mykelti Williamson, asks him a prescient question when he wonders what the purpose of the War was, if not to dethrone Saddam: "What do you wanna do, occupy Iraq and do Vietnam all over again?" But the most chilling scenes of political comment are the torture sequences wherein Said Taghmaoui's Captain tortures Wahlberg's frightened grunt for no particular reason. He just seems to want to teach him a lesson. And he does, pouring oil down his throat to ensure he understands the real motivation for the War. Wahlberg's dazed replies to his enquiries: "to maintain the stability of the region" etc, his lack of understanding of why he is there; are perhaps Russell's most pointed comment on his countries role in that conflict.
One of Three Kings other great strengths is obvious in that scene - this is unequivocally a film about the modern world, about how we live now, how things are and will be. American cultural imperialism is a given, so alongside torturing Wahlberg, Taghmaoui wants to discuss Michael Jackson with him, all the while awkwardly - and hilariously - using American slang terms to address him : Bro, Mymainman. His men watch MTV on stolen Kuwaiti televisions and risk their lives for Levis. Everybody has an intimate knowledge of Lexus models and Easy Listening tapes hide in Arab cars. Then there is the casual and brilliant realism of many of the references in Russell's dialogue - his soldiers discuss American Football, cars, religion, are at first awed by the violence they encounter. Ice Cube is a devout Christian, Spike Jonze an ignorant hick ("from a group home"). When Wahlberg rings his wife she asks him if she should apply for a job for him. The leader of the Iraqi rebels was educated in the US. Clooney ends up as a consultant on Hollywood action movies. This density of detail gives the movie texture, allows its narrative to breathe because the characters feel real and lived-in. Again, this makes their eventual loss and peril more affecting, meaning that the climax has a real power to it. Even better, Russell ends with a euphoric little coda, and perhaps the best ever, only-slightly ironic use of U2 in film.

THE FIGHTER

(David O. Russell, 2010)

The Fighter indulges in every boxing movie cliche imaginable. Here is a working class young man from a troubled background in an unfashionable part of America, taking beating after beating, his career and life seemingly going nowhere. And here is his sudden rise, buoyed by the love of a good, formidable woman, ending in a final shot at glory. Best of all, it's based on a true story. But David O. Russell really isn't interested in boxing cliches. Instead his focus is on the troubled, working class background. The young mans brother, a former golden boy contender turned chatterbox crack addict, is just as central to this film as the boxer himself, and his terrifying hydra of sisters and peroxide blonde mother are it's antagonists more than any of his opponents are.
But then Russell is clever. Understanding the cheap potency of those boxing cliches, he delivers them anyway, and they are as powerful and satisfying as ever, perhaps even moreso, because his choices are interesting. Reflecting the period in which the film is set, he shoots much of these sequences on cheap video - or at least film treated to look like video - and always includes the comentators on the soundtrack. Such fidelity to the unwritten rules of cinematic portrayals of pugilism is echoed in his cross-cutting between the ring and the reactions of spectators and the way the momentum and advantage swings between the fighters. He even throws in montages and distorts the soundtrack during slow motion instants. The film ends on a triumphant freezeframe, an almost self-parodic moment. Then Russell undercuts and denies the cliches at every turn. His characters are complex and difficult and the pain and awkwardness of their relationships is never downplayed. The big lesson he seems to have learned from Scorsese's Raging Bull is that the fights can be a relief from the emotional and psychic violence of interpersonal relationships, that the straightforward physical contest seems pure and almost wholesome by comparison.
Russell has always worked well with actors and here Christian Bale - as the crackhead brother - and Melissa Leo - as the peroxide blonde mother- are the real standouts, especially powerful in a couple of fierce scenes together, while Mark Wahlberg is all quiet, hurt dignity as the title character.
What separates the film from a legion of superficially similar boxing biopics is the energy it crackles with, there in Russell's mobile, live wire camera, the selection of classic rock and pop on the soundtrack, the intimate capture of a real community in Lowell, and in Bale's itchy bodypop of a performance.
All this and it works pretty much as well as Rocky, as feel good boxing films go.