Ruben Fleischer (2013)

This film first came to prominence last summer.  It was due for release in September and the trailer was already showing in American cinemas.  This included part of a scene in which characters open fire with machine guns in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, shooting at the audience through the cinema screen.   After the Aurora killings, the trailer was pulled, the release date postponed and the cast reassembled in late August to shoot a sequence, set in Los Angeles’ Chinatown district, to replace the Grauman’s one.  Gangster Squad tells the story of the unorthodox methods used by the LAPD in the early 1950s to defeat the mobster Mickey Cohen.  Cohen is the dominant figure in the city’s criminal underworld; his tentacular operations are assisted by the number of local politicians and policemen he has on his payroll.  The LAPD chief William Parker creates a special unit to get Cohen – a small group of armed officers, led by straight-as-a-die Sergeant John O’Mara, a World War II veteran.  O’Mara’s men carry out a succession of raids designed to break down Cohen’s empire and get to the heavily-protected man himself.   To the Los Angeles public and press, the group appear to be vigilantes.

Gangster Squad has finally arrived in cinemas at a time when Aurora has been eclipsed by the Sandy Hook shootings and the ensuing debate about American gun control laws, which the cinema murders didn’t spark (unsurprisingly, given the proximity of the killings to the presidential election).  In his robust defence of the ‘right to bear arms’, a week after Sandy Hook, Wayne La Pierre, the Chief Executive of the National Rifle Association, excoriated ‘sick’ violent cinema, of which Gangster Squad seems a pretty good example.  La Pierre had slasher movies in mind but a $75m Village Roadshow production, distributed by Warner Brothers, is arguably more offensive.   In the same 21 December statement, La Pierre also asserted that, ‘The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun’.  The ‘gangster squad’, which breaks the law in order to protect the law, is a demonstration of this principle in action.

Gangster Squad is handsomely lit by Dion Beebe and a good deal of attention has been given to recreation of somewhat stylised LA settings.  There’s no real movement going on in these settings, however – except for the shoot-ups and beatings.  Ruben Fleischer seems to have taken the view that he doesn’t need any further animation of the action.  The violent episodes function the way that songs and dances (the choreography of the mayhem is important) often did in musicals of the period in which Gangster Squad is set:  the audience can rest assured that the next number will be along very soon.  There’s so much violence that I found I was closing my eyes more in boredom than because it was too tough to watch.   The screenplay by Will Beall is based on a series of articles which Paul Lieberman wrote for the Los Angeles Times called Tales from the Gangster Squad.  Mickey Cohen and William Parker, at least, were real people but the framing narrative (a voiceover by O’Mara) sounds like a parody of Manichaean gangster movies of decades past and the register of the movie as a whole suggests a comic book source.   It’s one thing to translate comic book material into live action in the cinema.  Using live action to reduce criminal history to a comic book story seems futile.

This is Ruben Fleischer’s third feature, after a zombie comedy and an action comedy, and Will Beall’s first cinema screenplay.  You might not expect a work of art based on those CVs but what attracted the cast – and Sean Penn, Ryan Gosling and Josh Brolin in particular – to Gangster Squad?   As Cohen, Penn gives one of his rare bad performances.  He veers, as in Mystic River, from sullen quietness to explosive, yelling rage – a combination that makes him less powerful and expressive than usual.  As a cop who works hard and plays hard and joins the squad because he’s so upset by the Cohen gang’s killing of an innocent teenage boy, Ryan Gosling is wasted.  Unlike in Crazy, Stupid, Love. there’s no chemistry between him and Emma Stone.  (She plays an aspiring actress, Cohen’s moll and the Gosling character’s lover at the same time.)   Josh Brolin gets across O’Hara’s square-jawed rectitude without condescension.  Brolin’s squat phyisque allows him to be cartoonish without artificial aids; the same goes for Nick Nolte as Parker, yet his grizzled bulk and voice are ridiculous.  Other talented people wasting their time include Anthony Mackie, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Pena and Robert Patrick.  O’Hara’s wife is played by Mireille Enos:  she’s given to pronouncements like, ‘My husband isn’t much of a one for abstract thinking’ and Enos overdoes Connie O’Mara’s righteous exasperation at her man’s absolute determination to do the right thing.  She’s also involved in a scene which I think is more offensive than any of the explicit violence in the movie.  Cohen’s men fire a hail of shots at the O’Mara house one night when John O’Mara is out at work.  The heavily pregnant and terrified Connie tries desperately to take refuge.  When O’Mara returns home, he sees that the house is a crime scene and the bullet holes in the front door.  He pushes his way past the police and follows a trail of blood on the floor to the bathroom.  He and we see – as a rear view – Connie lying in the bath, and assume she’s dead.  In fact, she’s given birth to a boy, who’s in the bath with her.  Mother and baby are doing fine, although no one’s seen fit to attend to them – the baby is still streaked with blood from the birth.  But he puts out his hand to his father.  This is meant to be uplifting.

10 January 2013