Tag Archives: Zoe Saldana

Steel Mill Blues

Out of the Furnace

Rated R

When I lay my head down on the pillow each night, there are only two things I wish for. The first is to meet and marry the woman of my dreams and have seven children that all grow up to be Olympians, senators, longshoremen, cattle rustlers, rum-runners, drag queens and Chamber of Commerce members. The second is more Woody Harrelson. Honest to Christ, is there a more underrated actor in all of Hollywood? I eagerly await the day True Detective debuts on HBO so I can get my weekly Woody. (Jesus did I say that? Or just think it?)

Director Scott Cooper must hold similar sentiments, as he opens his latest—the grey-skied Rust Belt drama Out of the Furnace—with the man of the hour front and center. Harrelson plays Harlan DeGroat, a savage, bare-knuckle kingpin of the New Jersey backwoods, and announces his presence at a drive-in movie theater with a classic villainous introduction that immediately forces the audience to hate everything about his very being (reminiscent of Denzel’s introductory scene at the diner in Training Day). We are quickly transported to North Braddock, Pennsylvania, a dreary steel town in Allegheny County where Russell Baze (Christian Bale) leads a typical, if not content, millworker’s life. He has a troubled G.I. brother up to his eyes in the wrong kind of debt (Casey Affleck), a girlfriend longing for pregnancy (Zoe Saldana) and a father dying of cancer, watched over by a loving uncle (Sam Shepard).

Russell looks out for his brother, Rodney, best he can, paying forward to John Petty (Willem Dafoe), the seedy but good-hearted bar owner/back-alley fight promoter that just can’t seem to get the prideful Rodney to take a dive for the sake of evening the score. But Russell’s world is turned upside-down when he careens his truck into the back of a station wagon while under the influence, killing a mother and child. He’s sent to prison, whereupon he misses the death of his father, in addition to his girlfriend leaving him for a local cop (Forest Whitaker).

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As you might have gleaned, Out of the Furnace is not a particularly uplifting film. It strives from the outset for a tone of drab melancholy, depicting bemused yet sympathetic characters. The plot is slow to materialize, which at times is frustrating, but the beautifully smoky and grim Rust Belt scenery often stands firm in the plot’s rightful place. Make no mistake, though; it is a misstep that by the time Russell is released from prison, a good portion of the film has passed and we’re still without any real notion of where anything is headed. But where Killing Me Softly and The Counselor fell flat on their faces in this same predicament, Out of the Furnace gets by with its utter lack of pretension. There is no attempt whatsoever at conveying any sort of pseudo-philosophical bullshit, nor is there anything slick or sleek about the characters themselves. They’re gritty and bare bones, which is to say there is not one instance of Brad Pitt eating a cheeseburger in a leather coat.

Eventually Rodney pushes John Petty against his better judgment and into booking him a fight in the Ramapo Mountains of Appalachian New Jersey, where our underutilized villain resides as king hillbilly. In what probably marks the zenith of the film via interpolation of brutal fist fighting and deer hunting, the trip proves disastrous just as foreseen, leaving both Petty and Rodney dead. Back home in North Braddock, the wheels of justice are seemingly slow to turn due to state lines and the backwoods secrecy of the Ramapo hill people. This leads Russell down the inevitable path of taking matters into his own hands, walking the viewers down a stretch of misguided and somewhat uninteresting cat and mouse play between him and DeGroat. We’re led to a climax that is something less than climatic, which, when considering the film’s general deliberation, is not altogether surprising.

When all is said and done, Out of the Furnace is a flawed success. A character-driven drama lacking in substance, superbly acted and gloriously shot amid some of America’s most unsung natural beauty. In looking to bookend this review with ruminations on Woody Harrelson (which might as well be applied to all thoughts in life), his sterling performance of Harlan DeGroat serves as a euphemism for pretty much the entire film in that it’s both brilliant and underdeveloped. Out of the Furnace will likely leave you with that feeling of a near miss, though sometimes being near is still close enough.

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To the Letter

The Words

Rated PG-13

Writing can be a selfish practice. Writing about writing is probably even more so. In The Words, actor-turned-writer/director Brian Klugman and co-writer/director Lee Sternthal, both in their debuts as feature filmmakers, delve deep into what makes a writer tick. It’s a story within a story within a story–sort of the nesting doll equivalent of storytelling. But unlike those placid-faced novelties, The Words bears a much more troubled countenance.

The film opens with writer Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid) reading from his latest novel, which bears the same name as the movie, in front of a packed auditorium. This could be wishful thinking on the parts of Klugman and Sternthal, perhaps imagining that The Words would be similarly well received by real life audiences. Hammond’s story introduces us to Rory and Dora Jansen (Bradley Cooper and Zoe Saldana, respectively). Rory is a writer, too, and he’s on his way to pick up an award for his first novel, The Window Tears. However, as he and his wife pile into a limo on their way to the reception, there’s an old man (Jeremy Irons) lurking in the rain.

The Window Tears is a critical and commercial smash hit. The big break Rory, a struggling yet not-quite-starving artist, has always dreamed of. Unfortunately, he has a secret. While on vacation in Paris, Rory and Dora find a brief case in an antique store. Once they’re home, Rory discovers that it contains a tattered, old manuscript of a long-lost novel by an anonymous writer that was never published. Rory ends up getting the book published as his own, and the old man, whose name we never learn, reveals himself to Rory as The Window Tears’ author.

Meanwhile in Hammond’s world, he encounters a beautiful graduate student, Daniella (Olivia Wilde), during an intermission between chapters. He’s as taken with her as she is with his writing, but there’s something undeniably mysterious about her and her connection to what’s going on.

Back in the world of Hammond’s novel, the old man recounts to Rory the story behind The Window Tears, which is the kind of sprawling, tragic romance that novels are literally made of, and we are introduced to another set of characters, the old man as a young man (Ben Barnes) and his wife Celia (Nora Arnezeder).

To Klugman’s and Sternthal’s credits, the three layers of the story are clearly defined. The Words never falls into chaos, but the connection between the three couples isn’t drawn in an obvious way. In each case, we have a writer at different stages: the young man, just discovering his talents; Rory at the beginning of his career; and Hammond, middle-aged, confident and established. Irons as the old man, looking worn and grizzled, perhaps serves as the specter of death both in terms of being toward the end of his life, and also in literary terms since after he penned the novel Rory eventually stole, the old man never wrote again.

Though the male characters could be seen as archetypal forms, the female roles feel shallow. Saldana and Arnezeder are strong, painting endearing and sympathetic portraits of supportive wives, but they really don’t have much to work with. Wilde’s Daniella is presented as the most interesting. She’s guileful and captivating, shown off beautifully in expressive and intimate close-ups. But in the end, Daniella comes off written in as little more than a plot device.

Unlike nesting dolls, the storylines contained within The Words don’t fit together very neatly. As Hammonds tells Daniella, the worlds of reality and fiction may get very close to one another, but they never touch. And so, the frayed threads of these three stories are never tied together in a neat bow. However, The Words is still a literate, neatly executed and at times thought-provoking romance worthy of over-intellectualized discussion over coffee after it’s ended.