Antoine Fuqua (2009)
In the first scene, two men sit and talk in a car. It’s dark and there’s no sight or sound of anyone else around. The man in the driver’s seat tells the other man how he once had to break the law to save his life and how the judge who tried his case described what had happened not as a matter of right and wrong but as a matter of ‘righter and wronger’. The passenger, although he seems to be listening, clearly has something else on his mind. A few moments later, he shoots the driver at point blank range, grabs a bag of money from the dead man’s lap and runs off into the darkness. The murdered driver (played by Vincent D’Onofrio) may have only a small role in Brooklyn’s Finest but what he has to say is pretty well the text of the film, which Antoine Fuqua directed from a screenplay by Michael C Martin. The picture tells the stories of three NYPD cops (according to Wikipedia, Martin used to work as a traffic guard on the New York subway). Each of them, in extremis, is forced to do something wrong in order to do what he thinks is right.
The killer in the opening sequence is a detective called Sal Procida (Ethan Hawke), a family man who’s driven to homicidal extremes in order to find the money he needs for a deposit on a new house, which he can’t afford but has to get. Sal and his wife Angela (Lili Taylor) are Catholics; they and their brood of kids live in a crummy house, where the mould on the walls is getting into Angela’s lungs. (She’s asthmatic and now pregnant with twins.) Sal is the only one of the three protagonists, though, whose marriage is still alive. Eddie Dugan (Richard Gere), in his last week before retirement from the force after more than twenty years’ undistinguished service, is a lonely man since his marriage broke up: he regularly visits a prostitute (Shannon Kane) from whom he wants love as well as sex. Eddie has removed the bullets from his gun to stop himself putting one through his brain. The ambitious Clarence ‘Tango’ Taylor (Don Cheadle) is an undercover cop, working the drugs beat but now hankering after a suit and a desk job. He too lives alone: when he gets home, he opens his briefcase and its contents include photographs of him and his ex-wife in happier times.
It’s clear enough from this that the ideas and situations in Brooklyn’s Finest aren’t particularly original. If, at the start of a picture, someone is approaching the end of an unremarkable career it’s a safe bet things will liven up in its final days. And there are some clumsy bits early in Sal’s story which don’t bode well: he goes to confession and his side of the dialogue is badly overwritten when he inveighs against God (‘Why does He get all the glory and I get all the blame?’). It seems incredible that it’s not until he gets home the day after the murder and counts the money he stole from the man he killed that Sal realises it’s not as much as he needs. I still gave Brooklyn’s Finest the benefit of the doubt for over an hour (it runs 133 minutes). None of the stories is enough to sustain a feature-length picture but that needn’t be a problem if they work well in combination. We see Eddie and Tango pass by each other outside police headquarters and Sal and Eddie exchange a couple of words inside the building – but there’s no suggestion that they know each other. If the interactions between the men were no more than these fleeting ones, we might accept them as three NYPD life stories out of many. We might not feel that the miserable crisis in which each of Sal, Eddie and Tango find himself is entirely typical. But we’d be prepared to believe, thanks to the dynamic realism of the movie’s settings and action sequences, that the police in these areas of Brooklyn have an appallingly tough job; that they run a high risk of being brutalised and of having their personal lives wrecked by their work.
Where the film goes fundamentally wrong is in not allowing the stories to remain as formally parallel narratives. Instead, Antoine Fuqua and Michael C Martin contrive to have all three main characters end up at the same apartment block for the movie’s distressing, violent climax – although the bloodshed may be less offensive than the pat irony of Sal, having killed two drug dealers and taken apart a cooker to discover it’s packed with cash, being shot dead in the back as he stands with a wad of notes in each hand. Tango, who’s discovered how empty the achievement of promotion is, dies too – shot by Sal’s pal Ronnie (Brian F O’Byrne). Ronnie has worked out what Sal is up to and has desperately followed him to the block: he mistakes the un-uniformed Tango for a criminal. The only survivor – thanks to a particularly gruesome act of self-defence – is Dugan, now retired from the force. He salvages something from the wreckage by rescuing a young woman who’s been abducted. In the final shot, the camera freezes on his blood-streaked, weary, unsmiling face: we seem to be looking at a symbol of what you’re left with if you get out of a career in the New York police alive.
Brooklyn’s Finest is well enough acted – although if Ethan Hawke and Richard Gere pooled their histrionic energies and divided them in two they would both be better. Hawke works hard and holds your attention but he overdoes the burning, staring intensity of a disintegrating mind. Gere’s presence is more affectingly melancholic than you might expect but he can’t give enough to what are meant to be key lines, especially in the scene when he asks the prostitute to give up her job and come away with him. They’re not good lines, it’s true, but, when Gere reads them, he’s unable to suggest a verbally limited man trying to express himself as honestly as he can – he just sounds like a jaded actor who’s had to say this kind of stuff before. Don Cheadle is by far the best of the three principals: he gets across the anger that Tango’s primed to release in his dealings with the outside world while letting you see the grief he keeps to himself. I can’t think of many actors whose eyes express hurt as strongly as Cheadle’s and he never overuses them.
Wesley Snipes is the criminal friend whom Tango is asked to betray to land the desk job he wants and Michael Kenneth Williams is (again) impressive as a rival gangster. Ellen Barkin is monotonous and overemphatic as a hard-as-nails senior cop but Lili Taylor is lovely as Sal’s wife: she’s only in the picture for a couple of minutes but she manages in that time to suggest what once made this a happy marriage. Brian F O’Byrne is excellent as Ronnie: he convinces you not only that he’s a loyal friend to Sal but that working for NYPD is tough but survivable – this in spite of the fact that Ronnie’s involved in some of the most melodramatic bits of the plot. Dugan spends part of his last working week inducting rookies – Logan Marshall-Green and Jesse Williams both register strongly in these roles. (Antoine Fuqua’s best-known film to date was Training Day with Denzel Washington as the experienced cop and Ethan Hawke as the rookie.) The grimly exciting cinematography and editing are by Patrick Murguia and Barbara Tulliver respectively and the ominous, sinuous music by Marcelo Zarvos.
13 June 2010