AD ASTRA (US/China - 2019) Directed by James Gray. Written by James Gray and Ethan Gross. Cast: Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, Ruth Negga, John Ortiz, Liv Tyler, Kimberly Elise, Loren Dean, Greg Bryk, Donnie Keshawarz, Bobby Nish, Natasha Lyonne, LisaGay Hamilton, Sean Blakemore, John Finn, Freda Foh Shen, Ravi Kapoor. (PG-13, 123 mins)
Writer/director James Gray has spent too much of his career--dating back to 1994's LITTLE ODESSA--paying and repaying his dues. Starting out as a gifted NYC filmmaker of the Sidney Lumet sort whose style and subjects would've made him an influential auteur in the '70s instead of someone with a devoted cult following today, Gray hit a wall when he stood his ground against a meddling Harvey Weinstein over 2000's THE YARDS. Weinstein, at the peak of his powers as a Hollywood mover and shaker, retaliated by shelving the film for two years and then barely releasing it despite critical acclaim. Gray resurfaced with 2007's underrated cop thriller WE OWN THE NIGHT but again saw his momentum stalled when 2009's TWO LOVERS fell victim to star Joaquin Phoenix's faux-public meltdown with his fake documentary I'M STILL HERE. Gray's next film, the wonderful period piece THE IMMIGRANT, was acquired by Weinstein and, in one of the most flagrant acts of petty, prickish score-settling in recent Hollywood history, was promptly shelved for a year before being unceremoniously dumped on Netflix with no fanfare in 2014, as Weinstein opted to bury what would've been certain Oscar bait just to get back at a director who didn't cave to his bullying tactics 15 years earlier. 2017's THE LOST CITY OF Z was Gray's most ambitious project up to that time, and while it wasn't a big hit, he had the support of executive producer Brad Pitt and for the first time in a long time, didn't have to deal with any extraneous bullshit.
That brings us to Gray's latest film, the mega-budget, near-future sci-fi epic AD ASTRA, which again reunites him with producer Pitt, who also stars as Col. Roy McBride, a SpaceCom astronaut summoned to embark on a top-secret, classified mission to the outer reaches of the solar system, ostensibly to deal with a recent phenomenon known as "The Surge"--waves of power bursts that are posing a grave threat to Earth and the entire universe. The Surge has been traced to the Lima Project, an exploratory mission that took off 30 years earlier to search for intelligent life in the universe. SpaceCom lost contact with the Lima Project 16 years into the mission, the last official dispatch coming from Mars, with Lima now believed to have drifted into the orbit of Neptune. Roy has been chosen for a reason: his father Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones) was the commander of the Lima Project and SpaceCom brass has enough evidence to believe he's been alive all this time and might be the source of the threatening Surge. The assignment opens old wounds for Roy, who never got over the feeling of abandonment by his father, who's regarded as the world's greatest and bravest space traveler. Roy teams with Col. Pruitt (Donald Sutherland), an old colleague of his father's, and takes a commercial flight to the moon, now a popular tourist destination (with an Applebee's and a Subway in a shopping center), where the plan is to board a rocket to Mars, the last manned outpost in the solar system, to send a message to the Lima Project in the hopes that Clifford will respond. Pruitt is forced to sit out the remainder of the mission and remain on the moon after stress from a run-in with space pirates on the dark side of the moon sends him into emergency surgery, leaving Roy to go it alone with the crew of the Cepheus escorting him to Mars.
For its first hour and change, AD ASTRA (meaning "to the stars") is an effective reimagining of APOCALYPSE NOW, with Roy sent through the solar system ("upriver") to the Lima Project, now a de facto compound run by his father, who may be a rogue lunatic whose continued existence is a threat to all life everywhere. The exact purpose of the mission doesn't become clear to Roy for some time, but the Heart of Darkness-type set-up only ends up being a bait-and-switch for what slowly morphs into what can best be described as Terrence Malick remaking FIELD OF DREAMS and changing the setting from an Iowa cornfield to outer space. The notion of fractured familial bonds and fathers and sons not seeing eye to eye are recurring motifs in Gray's work going back to LITTLE ODESSA, and the idea of Jones' Clifford putting exploration before his duties as a husband and father echoes Charlie Hunnam's doomed Percy Fawcett in THE LOST CITY OF Z, but the shift in tone here doesn't really work. AD ASTRA had a somewhat troubled production, with shooting initially wrapping in the fall of 2017 followed by some badly-received test screenings that had 20th Century Fox ordering more than one round of reshoots and bumping the release date multiple times. To that end, AD ASTRA has the look and feel of compromise all over it. It's not enough that Gray turns his space-set APOCALYPSE NOW homage into a hard sci-fi FIELD OF DREAMS (and, to a certain extent, Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE, which starred Pitt), but he's also riffing on Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS, Christopher Nolan's INTERSTELLAR, Alfonso Cuaron's GRAVITY, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, plus the moon buggy chase with space pirates that seems like it's on loan from MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. AD ASTRA even finds room for an out-of-nowhere attack by crazed baboons that's straight out of a horror movie with someone getting their face chewed off. Gray's simply juggling too many things here--did a test audience member jokingly scribble "needs a baboon attack" on a feedback card and Fox execs inexplicably latched on to it?--and the film loses its way in the back end.
The end credits are filled with jobs preceded by the word "additional," which is rarely a good sign, and it's been rumored that second-unit director Dan Bradley (who helmed the ill-fated RED DAWN remake several years ago) was responsible for some of the reshoots. If that's the case, Gray's been very diplomatic about it, and regardless of its story deficiencies, AD ASTRA is a technical triumph filled with astonishing visual effects and stunning cinematography, mostly by recent Christopher Nolan collaborator Hoyte Van Hoytema (DUNKIRK), with the great six-time Oscar-nominee Caleb Deschanel credited with "additional photography," presumably because Van Hoytema was working on Nolan's upcoming TENET and wasn't available for reshoots (there's a great shot of a backlit Pitt running that's straight out of Michael Mann's THE KEEP, so bravo to whomever was responsible for that). Pitt, who's in virtually every scene, is excellent, though his performance grows more internalized as the film goes on, with Gray relying far too much on Roy's voiceover narration, which would be intentional as part of the APOCALYPSE NOW vibe of the far superior first half, but also seems like it's scrambling to clarify plot points like the original theatrical cut of BLADE RUNNER. Other than Pitt, everyone's screen time is limited, with Liv Tyler being particularly squandered as Roy's estranged wife and Jones' Clifford not really living up to the Kurtz-esque build-up the film provides him, though Gray makes his fleeting appearances count in the form of the always-unsettling garbled audio and distorted video transmissions. Wait...so add EVENT HORIZON and SUNSHINE to AD ASTRA's crib sheet.
THE LOST CITY OF Z (US/UK - 2017) Written and directed by James Gray. Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller, Tom Holland, Angus Macfadyen, Franco Nero, Ian McDiarmid, Edward Ashley, Clive Francis, Pedro Coello, Matthew Sunderland, Johann Myers, Aleksandar Jovanovic, Murray Melvin. (PG-13, 141 mins) Though he's been at it for nearly 25 years to significant critical acclaim, James Gray is a filmmaker perpetually in search of his big break. The first half of his career was plagued by long stretches of inactivity--his 1994 debut LITTLE ODESSA was followed by Harvey Weinstein shelving THE YARDS for two years before relegating it to a limited release in 2000 and several years passed before he returned with WE OWN THE NIGHT in 2007--while the second half was stalled by Joaquin Phoenix's Andy Kaufman-esque faux-meltdown while hitting the talk shows to plug 2009's TWO LOVERS, and 2014's THE IMMIGRANT was all but personally sabotaged by Harvey Weinstein, who acquired the kind of movie that cleans up during awards season and buried it in a blatant display of score-settling after clashing with Gray on THE YARDS. Gray could be forgiven if he was starting to feel that the entire movie industry was conspiring against him, but he's built a passionate cult of admirers among cineastes with his consistently excellent work over the years. Arguably the best American filmmaker working today that nobody knows about, Gray is an artist who was simply born too late. Influenced by the icons of past generations, from Sidney Lumet to Francis Ford Coppola to Martin Scorsese, Gray would've flourished in the 1970s. His early, gritty films have the distinctly vivid NYC feel that Lumet mastered, and THE IMMIGRANT--Gray's best film thus far--recalled the early 20th century immigrant experience in NYC as effectively as the young Vito Corleone scenes in THE GODFATHER PART II or the whole of Joan Micklin Silver's HESTER STREET.
Coming just three years after THE IMMIGRANT, Gray's latest film is the most radical departure of his career thus far, an adaptation of David Grann's 2009 non-fiction chronicle of British Army Lt. Percy Fawcett's obsession with finding a mythical ancient city deep in Amazonia, eventually disappearing with his son sometime in 1925, never to be seen again. As the film opens in 1905, Fawcett (played here by SONS OF ANARCHY's Charlie Hunnam, in a role originally intended for executive producer Brad Pitt), is a career military man and exemplary officer and marksman who's nonetheless consistently passed over for promotions and commendations as a result of his being the son of a drunken disgrace ("He's been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors," one high-ranking general from the "jolly good, old chap!" school harumphs to another). Fawcett doesn't rock the boat, going wherever he's ordered even if it means being away from his wife Nina (Sienna Miller) and their young son Jack. He's given an unusual opportunity by the Royal Geographical Society to put his cartography skills to use by journeying into Amazonia to map out a border between Bolivia and Brazil, who are ready to declare war over the region's rich rubber plantations. Assembling a small expedition that includes appointed aide-de-camp Henry Costin (Robert Pattinson) and fellow officer and friend Arthur Manley (Edward Ashley), Fawcett also traces the source of the Rio Verde river and is hailed a hero when he arrives back in England. But while in the harsh region, Fawcett found traces of the existence of an ancient culture, an indigenous people who left evidence of art, craftsmanship, and language centuries earlier. The Society and its stodgy old-timers are expectedly incredulous, refusing to believe that "savages" are capable of sophisticated, intelligent thought and reason. Fawcett organizes another journey into the region, this time accompanied by James Murray (Angus Macfadyen, BRAVEHEART's Robert the Bruce and CRADLE WILL ROCK's Orson Welles in his best role in years), a veteran Arctic explorer who was second-in-command on the Shackleton expedition. The aging and out-of-shape Murray proves to be dead weight in the heat of the rain forest, growing ill and being sent off on his own with a native guide only to later accuse Fawcett of abandoning and leaving him to die. WWI beckons and Fawcett's explorations are put on hold until years later, when he and his now grown eldest son Jack (Tom Holland, soon to be seen as Peter Parker in the upcoming SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING) set off to find Fawcett's Moby Dick--The Lost City of Z (pronounced "zed")--to prove his theories of the existence of the ancient, yet advanced culture.
Even more ambitious than THE IMMIGRANT, THE LOST CITY OF Z finds Gray embracing the '70s auteur spirit, shooting on 35mm film (again working with IMMIGRANT cinematographer Darius Khondji) and actually taking Hunnam, Pattinson, and the other actors deep into remote regions of Colombia to shoot among the hazardous elements. Likewise, the bulk of the scenes at home in England are shot in actual locations (the scene where Fawcett's ship docks back home is a CGI effect that sticks out like a sore thumb). As a producer, Pitt seems to be someone who, when the opportunity presents itself, gets behind filmmakers drawn the kind of classical '70s aesthetic to which Gray subscribes, as seen in his work with Andrew Dominik (THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD and KILLING THEM SOFTLY) and even Angelina Jolie's turgid but very '70s Antonioni-lite BY THE SEA. The use of film and actual places makes you smell the jungle and feel the sweltering humidity, and it gives THE LOST CITY OF Z a sense of texture and the feeling of an adventure saga of old, something David Lean might've made made with Peter O'Toole in the 1960s or Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski in the 1970s. It's hard not to be reminded of the Herzog/Kinski masterpieces AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GOD and FITZCARRALDO throughout THE LOST CITY OF Z, especially early on when, deep in the heart of the Bolivian jungle, they stumble on an opera house right in the middle of a rubber plantation owned by Baron de Gondoriz (Franco Nero), an actual historical figure whose depiction here is an obvious shout-out to Kinski's Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald in FITZCARRALDO. Comparisons to AGUIRRE come later as Fawcett descends into a certain level of madness, though subtly played, as he and Jack face certain death and he tries to calm his son with a wide-eyed declaration of "Whatever happens...it is our destiny!" But ultimately, the film THE LOST CITY OF Z most resembles is Bob Rafelson's acclaimed and unjustly forgotten 1990 exploration saga MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON--a throwback epic even way back then--which examined the rivalry between Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke's attempts--together and separate--to find the source of the Nile.
THE LOST CITY OF Z works best when it's on the river or in the jungle. It's when Fawcett is back home with his family that things get a little shaky. Gray doesn't do the best job managing the passage of time. It's never quite clear, at least as it's presented here, how he's "been gone for years" when every time he returns home, Nina has an infant child. In actuality, Fawcett mapped the Bolivia/Brazil border and discovered the source of the Rio Verde on two different expeditions. Here, it's presented as happening on the same one. While there were expeditions that lasted a few years, he had to return home to England more than is presented here or else the existence of the two kids can't be explained. At one point, it's flat-out mentioned "You've been gone for years," while Nina is holding what looks like a six-month-old baby. Whether we're supposed to make the leap that yes, he's coming home a lot and leaving again, isn't handled in the smoothest fashion. Hunnam turns in a powerful performance, though it's Pattinson who impresses in the quieter sidekick role. Pattinson never seemed at ease with the blockbuster attention that the TWILIGHT movies gave him, as one can see in his career choices since, which have seen him tackling two ambitious if unsuccessful projects with David Cronenberg (COSMOPOLIS, MAPS TO THE STARS) and David Michod's underrated Australian dystopian revenge drama THE ROVER. By the success of TWILIGHT, you'd think Pattinson would be locked in as the star, but he takes the supporting character and really creates something with it, and the bond that develops between Fawcett and Costin feels richer and more developed than anything involving Fawcett and his wife and kids, and the fact that we don't know a whole lot about Jack makes the father-son bonding and the final act seem rushed, which ultimately compromises the impact of the closing scenes. Still, despite the hiccups, this is majestic, passionate moviemaking that you really don't see anymore (is it a sad state of affairs when you see an establishing shot of the jungle and feel a sense of relief that you aren't hearing CCR's "Run Through the Jungle" as accompaniment?), and we could always use films like THE LOST CITY OF Z that offer a tangible, organic "reality" that you just don't get with today's overabundance of CGI and greenscreen bullshit. I don't know about you, but I'm willing to go a little easy on some screenplay flaws for some believable scenes of actors in actual risky situations in actual unpleasant conditions.
THE IMMIGRANT (US/France - 2014) Directed by James Gray. Written by James Gray and Richard Menello. Cast: Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Renner, Dagmara Dominczyk, Yelena Solovey, Angela Sarafyan, Jicky Schnee, Antoni Corone, Maja Wampuszyk, Ilia Volok, Joseph Calleja. (R, 117 mins) "You are not nothing."
Writer/director James Gray isn't the most prolific of American filmmakers with just five films over his 20-year career (plus co-writing this year's BLOOD TIES), but there's been a growing consensus that he's among the most under-appreciated. His latest film, THE IMMIGRANT, was poised to be his breakthrough that would get him the accolades and respect that's been a long time coming. Early buzz on THE IMMIGRANT prior to its May 2014 release was overwhelmingly positive, and then...nothing. US distributor The Weinstein Company began slowly rolling it out and abruptly pulled the plug. It trickled into some major cities and the people who saw it raved about it. As recently as last week, it was still playing in a few art houses in the US, but at its widest release, it was only on 150 screens. Whatever momentum that was building for the film has long since stalled and while there's no DVD/Blu-ray street date as of yet, it unexpectedly turned up as a Netflix Instant streaming title this week. While such a move makes THE IMMIGRANT available to more audiences than ever, the treatment given to the film by its distributor borders on criminal, and once again, Gray is relegated to being the next big thing in American cinema, which he apparently always will be.
Gray's 1994 debut LITTLE ODESSA got some good reviews but landed him with the "Tarantino wannabe" tag and the film lumped in with the post-RESERVOIR DOGS crime genre. His follow-up, THE YARDS, the first of four collaborations with star Joaquin Phoenix and the first of two pairing Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg, sat on a Miramax shelf for two years before Harvey Weinstein barely released a recut version on just 146 screens in 2000 (Gray's improved director's cut was eventually issued on a special edition DVD). It was another seven years before Gray resurfaced with the major-studio crime saga WE OWN THE NIGHT (2007), which reteamed Phoenix and Wahlberg and harkened back to the gritty cop dramas of Sidney Lumet, a major Gray influence. Despite generally positive reviews, audiences didn't respond. Gray's next film was 2009's TWO LOVERS, a departure with Phoenix as a sad sack recovering from a suicide attempt and torn between manipulative Gwyneth Paltrow and sweet Vinessa Shaw. It was a step away from cops & criminals films and demonstrated Gray's versatility, but any chance TWO LOVERS might've had was torpedoed when Phoenix used its publicity tour to go on talk shows in his madman-bearded, Andy Kaufman-esque meltdown stunt which was later revealed to be a hoax for his faux documentary I'M STILL HERE. With a history of credible critical acclaim but minimal audience interest, Gray's day in the sun was finally supposed to happen with THE IMMIGRANT. At this point, one can hardly blame the man if he may start to feel that the entire film industry is conspiring against him.
THE IMMIGRANT finds Gray in familiar--and problematic--company: it reunites him with Phoenix, even after the TWO LOVERS debacle, and the film's distribution rights were picked up by The Weinstein Company. Considering how unpleasant Gray's last experience with Miramax-era Harvey Weinstein proved to be, it's not out of the realm of possibility that Weinstein's abandonment of THE IMMIGRANT and its unceremonious dumping on Netflix Instant less than two months after its miniscule theatrical release and before a DVD/Blu-ray street date has even been announced has the distinct stench of score-settling. Even if it isn't, the treatment that's been bestowed upon THE IMMIGRANT is a tragedy. It's a great film--emotional, heartfelt, beautifully acted, masterfully filmed. It's the kind of richly-detailed, exquisitely-crafted, prestigious period piece that was commonplace in the 1970s and 1980s--the time that a director like Gray really would've flourished--and the kind of majestic Oscar-sweeper that the Weinstein of 10-15 years ago would've been aggressively pushing come awards season. Times have changed, and if something like THE IMMIGRANT gets swept under the rug and banished to the world of Netflix streaming without ever being given much of a shot, then the movie industry is indeed broken beyond repair.
In a career-best performance, Marion Cotillard is Ewa Cybulska, a Polish woman arriving at Ellis Island in 1921 with her sickly sister Magda (Angela Sarafyan). Magda is quarantined for six months due to tuberculosis, while Ewa, thanks to dubious claims of "immoral" behavior on the trip to America, is immediately processed for deportation back to Europe. Ewa, a nurse in her homeland for a British diplomat's family, speaks perfect English and after a chance process-room encounter with one Bruno Weiss (Phoenix), ends up leaving with him and staying at his Lower East Side apartment. Weiss seems to manage a crew of "doves"--beautiful young immigrant women who perform at a burlesque venue and whom he pimps out to customers backstage after the shows. He has a connection at Ellis Island with processing officer McNally (Antoni Corone), who helps him procure new women. Bruno senses something special with Ewa, who only wants to free her sister from quarantine and get their piece of the American dream.
Nothing happens the way you expect it to with THE IMMIGRANT. You expect Bruno to be a heartless bastard. You expect Ewa to be a naive innocent. Bruno talks a good game but isn't the smoothest operator, and Ewa has street smarts and a keen sense of self-preservation that you rarely see in immigration dramas of this sort. Ewa begins working as one of Bruno's prostitutes, and rather than gleefully count the money she makes for him, Bruno feels genuine remorse because he loves her. The story gets complicated with the introduction of Bruno's cousin Emil (Jeremy Renner), aka "Orlando the Magician," who arrives back home and is immediately drawn to Ewa. THE IMMIGRANT isn't so much a "dark side of the American dream" misery-fest as much as it's a somewhat cynical triumph of the human spirit saga, one that remains plausible in Ewa's many disappointments but also earns its few feel-good moments legitimately. Lives can change in an instant, and nothing in THE IMMIGRANT is black or white. Even when Bruno is at his worst, Phoenix manages to make you care about him, as when he eavesdrops on Ewa as she's in a confessional and only then understands the horrific life she and her sister have had and how much the promise of America means to them. Also, Gray doesn't paint Ewa as a crucified martyr. She can be just as cold and cruel as the world around her, and even a shift in Emil/Orlando's behavior plays as completely natural and believable, where many less nuanced directors would've crammed it into place.
James Gray and cinematographer Darius Khondji
Gray, cinematographer Darius Khondji (THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN, SE7EN, MIDNIGHT IN PARIS) and the production design team have fashioned a visual triumph with THE IMMIGRANT. Shot in muted and sepia-tinged tones, the look of the film recalls the Young Vito Corleone sequences in THE GODFATHER PART II (1974) and the flashback scenes in Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1984), as well as Milos Forman's RAGTIME (1981) and Paul Thomas Anderson's THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007), and though it's not a western, you'll sense the visual influence of Michael Cimino's HEAVEN'S GATE (1980) as well. Movies just don't look like THE IMMIGRANT anymore: the attention to detail is such that you feel transported to 1921 Manhattan. Gray's use of CGI is seamless, utterly non-intrusive, and highly effective. He tells the story efficiently and succinctly, always focused and making every moment and every shot count as the film just under two hours and feels complete, where nine out of ten filmmakers would've had this clocking in at a minimum of three hours. His framing of the actors and the action throughout frequently resemble old photographs, and the composition of the final shot is stunning in its presentation. THE IMMIGRANT would obviously play best on a big screen, but most of us won't have that option. In the end, sure, it's just a movie, but when something this vital, ambitious, powerful, and just flat-out beautiful can't seem to find its place in the world, much like its beleaguered heroine, then there's something very wrong with the state of cinema and film distribution. This is a film that should be celebrated. Instead, it's being streamed. In short, THE IMMIGRANT is a masterpiece in search of an audience and it's time for James Gray to get his props as one of today's great filmmakers. The "James Gray is the best filmmaker you've never heard of" pieces every time he makes a movie are getting tiresome. Give him a seat at the table. He's earned it.
Directed by Guillaume Canet. Written by Guillaume Canet and James Gray. Cast: Clive Owen, Billy Crudup, Marion Cotillard, James Caan, Mila Kunis, Zoe Saldana, Matthias Schoenaerts, Lili Taylor, Noah Emmerich, John Ventimiglia, Domenick Lombardozzi, Yul Vazquez, Richard Petrocelli, Jamie Hector, Eve Hewson, Griffin Dunne, Olek Krupa. (R, 129 mins)
Since his 1994 debut LITTLE ODESSA, writer/director James Gray's films have always felt out of place with contemporary cinema. Initially lumped in with the post-RESERVOIR DOGS, Tarantino indie scene, the not-prolific Gray has established himself as more of a Sidney Lumet disciple with his gritty, character-driven, low-key NYC period pieces that frequently involve cops, criminals, and the blurred lines that separate them (most notably his underrated 2007 gem WE OWN THE NIGHT, set in the late '80s with connected club owner Joaquin Phoenix taking on his Russian mob friends after they shoot his cop brother Mark Wahlberg). BLOOD TIES seems like the movie Gray's wanted to make for the last 20 years, but alas, he only co-wrote it, as TELL NO ONE director Guillaume Canet fashions this French production as a loving throwback to the tough, hard-edged NYC cinema of the 1970s. It's a triumph of production design and visual detail as Canet and the crew flawlessly recreate 1970s Brooklyn, augmented by subtle examples of seamless, non-intrusive CGI done right. If only as much attention had been paid to the script.
A remake of Jacques Maillot's 2008 film LES LIENS DU SANG (RIVALS), which was set in 1979 Paris, BLOOD TIES opens in 1974 Brooklyn (with a bloody, brain-splattering shootout accompanied by the Ace Frehley version of "New York Groove," which wasn't recorded until 1978 but let's not nitpick because it's a terrific scene) and offers the old standby of the just-paroled con (Clive Owen as Chris) trying to stay straight. He's constantly butting heads with his resentful brother, NYPD cop Frank (Billy Crudup in the role Canet himself played in RIVALS), who gets him a job at a garage where he meets and falls for cashier Natalie (Mila Kunis), while trying to connect with his two kids and dealing with his bitter, hooker ex Monica (Marion Cotillard). Meanwhile, Frank has arrested low-level mook Scarfo (BULLHEAD's Matthias Schoenaerts), who owns a van that's been tied to a rash of robberies. Scarfo claims he's innocent and the whole thing is a set-up by a vengeful Frank, who used to be involved with his wife Vanessa (Zoe Saldana). As Chris struggles to stay afloat after a potential deal to open a snack stand with his ex-con buddy Mike (Domenick Lombardozzi) falls apart, he eventually accepts a job from mob-connected bar owner Fabio (Yul Vazquez) to rub out three rivals with the Famous Last Words caveat "I just wanna get back on my feet...I'm not gonna make a habit of this." Of course, one job leads to another and as the cops continue to keep an eye on Chris, who buys Natalie a beautiful engagement ring and is suddenly able to afford an expensive new TV for their ailing father (James Caan), Frank starts getting heat from his boss (Noah Emmerich) and the NYPD brass starts questioning his loyalty.
Released in Europe last year at 144 minutes, BLOOD TIES has been cut by 15 minutes for its dump-job of a US release (28 screens and VOD). Whether distributor Lionsgate made these edits with or without Canet's involvement is unknown, but at least in this incarnation, it feels rushed and incomplete. It aspires to be an epic, sprawling crime saga, but it suffers from an awfully choppy opening half-hour and a finale that feels too abrupt, and as a result, the film jumps all over the place and feels like a series of vignettes rather than a cohesive whole. What exactly is Chris? It's explained that he was in prison for a revenge killing when his girlfriend--presumably Monica--was raped and he offed the attacker. But once out, he becomes a hit man and later, out of nowhere, he's suddenly a pimp. The film takes place over a few months from late 1974 into early 1975 but the time element never feels right. Too much goes down in such a short amount of time. Also, there's numerous instances where people are congregated in a scene and behaving as if their last scene together didn't happen. There's one glaring instance of two scenes that seem to be out of order when Frank kicks temporary roommate Chris out of his apartment, and in the very next scene, Frank is outraged and storms out of the room when he's told by an NYPD honcho that unless he tells Chris to move out, he'll have to turn in his gun and badge. The large supporting cast gets little to do: Caan has a big, emotional speech that feels shoehorned in, and Cotillard and Schoenaerts finally get their own plot threads going around 100 minutes into the movie, as if the filmmakers suddenly remembered they were in it.
Is this something unique to the US cut or was this a problem in the European version as well? Even if the flow and the rhythm of the story are improved by those missing 15 minutes, it won't eliminate the predictable story elements and the cliched execution. How many times have we seen the ex-con sucked back into "the life"? How many times have we seen brothers on opposite sides of the law clash only to have the familial bonds reunite them? It's a great song, but at what point do we stage an intervention for a filmmaker who makes the conscious, straight-faced decision to use the Velvet Underground's "Heroin" for a scene where a junkie falls off the wagon and hits bottom? Canet indulges in some heavy Scorsese worship throughout BLOOD TIES, and it's fun early on when he shows Chris watching Monica walk away in slo-mo to Lee Moses' "Bad Girl" or late in the film when he's fleeing the cops and speeding from place to place like Ray Liotta's coke-addled Henry Hill in GOODFELLAS. Scorsese-worship can be a blast--David O. Russell's AMERICAN HUSTLE is recent proof of that--but someone needs to tell Canet that you can't have the camera slowly move in on the pensive visage of Clive Owen to the opening guitar riff of Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love" nearly 25 years after GOODFELLAS and expect to be taken seriously.
BLOOD TIES is a mess, but it's a beautiful mess, and the performances of Owen and Crudup (looking a lot like a younger Harvey Keitel here) are top-notch. Canet aims high and sometimes hits the mark (there's a kinetic energy to the opening shootout, and one late phone call between Chris and Frank has a gut-wrenching moment of clarity for both of them), and even with its copious cliches, there's a very good film trying to break out of the merely OK one in which it's trapped. It's pretty obvious that Gray was a gun-for-hire on this one, probably brought on to ensure that the dialogue had a genuine NYC feel to it instead of sounding awkwardly translated from French. Gray's films don't lean this heavily on cliches and convention, whereas Canet is a movie buff with an obvious affinity for 1970s crime flicks and wanted to make one of his own. That's great, and he certainly succeeded on a visual level and got the right attitude from his actors--this is a rare-for-these-days example of a 1970s-set film not looking like a bunch of out-of-their element, in-over-their-heads actors playing ironic hipster dress-up against a gaudy digital greenscreen--but the script just doesn't hold up its end of the deal.
