John Slattery (2014)
The UK premiere of God’s Pocket at BFI was an unhappy experience. The film is John Slattery’s debut as a cinema director and features one of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last screen appearances so it’s a double pity that it’s not good. To make things worse, the screening was followed by a Q&A chaired by Jonathan Romney. It was pretty clear he didn’t think much of the film but that was no excuse for the tetchy questions Romney put to John Slattery and Christina Hendricks, who has the main female role. Too many of these questions were about Mad Men (which evidently and reasonably exasperated Slattery), including the obvious and, for good actors, insulting ‘When you play a character in a long-running television series, do you find them taking you over?’ When Romney, after hogging the interview for twenty minutes, turned to the audience in NFT1 and demanded questions in a half-condescending, half-peremptory tone, I decided it was time to go.
One thing the Q&A did convey strongly was that this was a labour of love for John Slattery but that’s probably part of what’s wrong with the film. Adapted by him and Alex Metcalf from Pete Dexter’s first novel, God’s Pocket is set in the late 1970s in a working class area of Philadelphia (clearly based on ‘the Devil’s Pocket’, part of the real Philadelphia.) Slattery, born in 1962 to an Irish-American Catholic family in Boston, Massachusetts, explained that he felt a connection with the people in the story although his own upbringing had been more comfortable than theirs. Jonathan Romney was right that the film’s register ‘keeps slipping around’ – from grim, lower-depths realism to black comedy and back. Slattery in response insisted that these shifts mirrored the original novel and he’s clearly anxious to treat the characters generously; but it’s difficult to realise the locals as anything other than a dismal, often menacing tribe – especially when the protagonist and most sympathetic person in evidence, Mickey Scarpato (Hoffman), isn’t a God’s Pocket native (as others keep reminding him). Mickey and his friend Arthur Capezio (John Turturro) are meat-packers but their work regularly brings them into contact with organised crime. It’s the people who prop up the neighbourhood bar, rather than the mobsters, who most lower the spirits, however.
Lance Acord’s muddy lighting, which obviously matches the mood of the piece, is monotonous; my eyes aren’t good but I don’t usually need to peer to make out the faces on the screen. The black comedy provides some of the better moments – particularly a sequence involving Mickey, who has to arrange the funeral of his stepson Leon, and the mortician Smilin’ Jack Moran (Eddie Marsan). Mickey’s unexpected entrance makes Jack jump just as he’s applying the finishing embalming touches to Leon’s corpse; later in the scene, the two men come to blows and Jack falls over, accidentally banging the coffin lid shut. There’s physical abuse much more garish and gory than this in the course of God’s Pocket; for example, when Joyce Van Patten (John Slattery’s mother-in-law), as an elderly florist, whips out a gun and dispatches two hoods. Van Patten plays the scene straight and makes it work but even when the violence verges on the cartoonish, it sits uneasily within a film that’s largely realistic. Slattery handles other comic bits rather lamely: a shot of an advertising sign missing a letter; a sequence in stalled traffic where the celebrity local journalist Richard Shelburn (Richard Jenkins) is trying – audibly – to compose deathless prose, to the amusement of the blue collar man in the car alongside. God’s Pocket would have been a more coherent piece of work – although probably more dislikeable – if it had been directed by someone as confidently misanthropic as the Coens.
Philip Seymour Hoffman’s presence dominates. This isn’t just because of his recent death although that inevitably affects how you see him on screen – especially as Mickey spends a good deal of God’s Pocket dealing with the funeral. (The bit in which Hoffman chooses a coffin is hard to watch.) It was interesting to hear from John Slattery that he first approached Hoffman about playing Richard Shelburn rather than Mickey Scarpato. Hoffman understandably felt that Mickey would be a greater challenge but Slattery’s original instinct was probably right. In the Q&A Slattery quoted the opening of Pete Dexter’s novel: ‘Mickey Scarpato was forty-five and didn’t understand women … the way poor people don’t understand the economy’. Mickey in the film is powerfully oppressed and struggles to communicate but he never seems uncomprehending: Hoffman had an extraordinary ability to suggest different kinds of intelligence but he’s a shade too sharp-witted here. Richard Jenkins is always witty and shows how Shelburn has come too easily to accept his faults but it’s hard to credit how this man has become a big name in the neighbourhood (and not just through his daily newspaper column – he’s someone whose face is recognised by the locals in the bar). I wish Philip Seymour Hoffman had played Shelburn; he would have been so good (as he was in Doubt) at distinguishing the journalist’s public and private faces. Christina Hendricks is barely adequate as Mickey’s wife Jeannie, who’s convinced that the death of her borderline psychotic, coked-up son Leon wasn’t the work accident it’s supposed to be. The audience, having witnessed what happened, knows that Jeannie’s intuition is right but it’s never proved to be right. That makes it all the more important for Christina Hendricks to suggest that it’s this gut feeling that keeps Jeannie going in the immediate aftermath of Leon’s death but she’s blank. Eddie Marsan is just right, though, as Jack Moran and Peter Gerety is admirably nuanced as the bar owner McKenna. As Leon, Caleb Landry Jones does the kind of make-the-most-of-it overacting which makes you pretty sure the character isn’t long for the film – or makes you hope they’re not anyway.
4 August 2014
