We Own the Night

Pretty much exactly as good as I thought it'd be. At some point I'm going to have to forgive Joaquin Phoenix the grudge I hold him for being in Gladiator and then further soiling my memory with his performance in Signs, cuz he's really actually a pretty good actor.

The car scene, in the rain, was easily the best point of the film: the way they used no (or almost no?) incidental music through the thing, no exaggerated speed noises or screeches of tires, the way the overwhelming color was the actual blue color of rain, they way they kept the jump-cuts pretty minimal. It could've been better if they'd have let the seen run up a little bit before the point when you realize what's happening, with maybe a lighter beginning in the car or something, but the actual action itself was extremely well done, and in a subtle way you usually don't see in huge mainstream flicks like this: of course, it was allowed to do it that way because it's a cop drama, not a cop action movie.

But then they followed it up with the scene in the hotel room where Eva Mendez finds out that Joaquin "Bobby" Phoenix is taking the cop exam and gets upset, followed by Joaquin doing some serious "acting" like slamming his fist on the counter and tipping over the bottle of whiskey and screaming at her. It was such a half-assed scene, poorly acted by both the characters but it would've been hard to act right because of how poorly it was set up and the really bad dialogue for them to try to act around. Also, it'd been so long since we'd really seen anything of their characters by that point that there really wasn't much of a sense of who they were anymore.

There were some real chances for good shots in this: especially in the climactic scene, the wide shot of the grass burning and the overall scene of Bobby walking through the tall grass hunting Vadim, but the movie didn't linger enough for them to work like I wanted them to. (I'm thinking along the lines of the scenes in the grass in The New World, maybe).

I also kind of felt like the movie was working too hard to try to make a point at the same time that it was working too hard to appear like it wasn't trying to make a point. So you're supposed to walk away thinking, "Well, Bobby joined the side of the 'good guys,' right, but look where it got him? His dad's dead; his girlfriend's gone (highlighted by Bobby's misrecognition of a face in the audience at his graduation ceremony); and now his brother's getting a desk job so he won't get to work with him, either. He's really alone. So maybe he'd have been better off to stay out of it or something?" I don't know. Ultimately it just doesn't seem like that interesting of a question; especially because the binary between a rich life with lots of friends and the ascetic life of the strait and narrow is one that the movie totally created in the first place (not that it "created" it since it's obviously a long-standing idea in human consciousness, but that it created it for itself).

But, whatever. Could've used more and better eighties music, too. At least some New Order in the background or something.

***
(10/18)

The most actually interesting thing about the movie was the way it kept reiterating that the bad Russian guys "were not afraid" of the police. They didn't view the police as all-powerful, and they didn't see them as anything but another group of guys trying to fuck with their shit. The movie itself seemed to go a little out of its way to present the police as just another group of guys, as well. Most of the cops know Bobby, and the fact that his father and brother are high-ups in the department make all the actions of the police toward Bobby seem to be, at least to some extent, just and extension of Bobby's father's power. Similarly, Bobby's "conversion" to the good guys only comes about because he wants revenge against the guys who shot his brother and murdered his father, and it's really his family connections more than anything that makes it possible to join the police and suddenly be assigned to the same case that his brother's working on. The most hammer-over-the-head moment along these lines comes when Bobby's kind of beating up his old friend, and he says something like "I'm a cop now, so I can do anything I want." In other words, to a degree the film is trying to expose the monopoly on power that the police have as being nothing more than just their assertion of that monopoly, not something granted them by God or, more mysteriously, "the public." The police in the movie behave in pretty much the same way you'd expect a rival mafia to behave if the movie were just about two mafias. Even the film's title, which apparently comes from some slogan on NYPD badges is just an assertion of power, nothing at all like the mystical force for good we're conditioned to believe to be the case in our society.

Really, though, I wonder how different this is than a lot of cop movies, like even Dirty Harry, where the cops are portrayed as loose cannons, etc.? The most important difference, I guess, is that even in the Dirty Harry movies, the organization of the police itself is never really exposed or questioned, it's only the individual cops. And, actually, I do think the movie succeeds a little bit in its attempt to expose and critique the state monopoly on power, but I wonder if, by making the film a period piece, it might not weaken the critique just a little bit.

Here's James Gray on Bobby in his movie: "He became a police officer and abandoned his true self." Gray seems to think that's the heart of his movie that everyone's missing. It seemed pretty obvious to me. There's the opening scene, with Eva Mendes's boob, and Bobby saying "I could die right now and I'd be happy" and then the closing scene, where Mark Wahlberg says "I love you very much" and Bobby repeats it back to him, but it's obvious that he's not happy. But, I don't know, "abandoned his true self?" That's such a lame problem, this pining after yr "true self," like that's some actual thing out there that you have to discover and then adhere to. In a more realistic interpretation of Bobby's character, his problem at the end seems to have a lot more to do with loneliness than any true self abandoning. He loved Eva Mendes but he lost her because he acted like a dick and treated her like an accessory to his own, more important life. But he was kind of doing that before he abandoned his "true self;" at least some of why he chose her as the girlfriend to bring to meet his family was that he knew bringing a Puerto Rican would piss his dad off, and making out with her in the stairwell while the cops had a moment of silence for a fallen comrade was consistent more with that. But that's enough psychology. There's too much shoddy psychology in movies, this one included.