Out of the Furnace
(2013)
Scott Cooper’s sophomore film is a handsomely mounted,
well-performed revenge drama with pretensions of being about “stuff”. You know,
meaty stuff, like man’s propensity for violence and the disintegration of local
economies. As good as it is in moments – a scene here or there – it fails to
resonate on a broader level. As if merely invoking thematic content and having
it stretch in bloated fashion across the Pennsylvania landscape, accompanied by
Pearl Jam, is enough. It isn’t and the result is distinctly underwhelming.
Cooper wrote the screenplay with Brad Ingelsby, and he takes
in a range of tropes, all of them over-familiar. Christian Bale is Russell
Baze, a blue-collar steel worker who serves a stretch for vehicular homicide
(he was over the limit at the wheel). While he is inside his Iraq veteran
younger brother Rodney (Casey Affleck) has resorted to bareknuckle boxing, in
consort with John Petty (Willem Dafoe) a loan shark and wheeler-dealer. The two
of them go missing after Rodney persuades Petty to get him a fight in New
Jersey. This is Deliverance
territory, where even the police fear to tread, which leads Russell to make his
own justice.
We’ve seen all this before, but rarely with quite such sombre
and self-important posturing. Yet none of it feels quite right. Elements are
plucked out of the air because they sound dramatic, rather than because they
add up. It’s an easy dramatic device to feature an unstable soldier in a movie,
one who can’t handle the things he saw. And it’s an even easier one to have a
psychotic backwater loon who’ll kill you as soon as give the time of day.
Affleck, master of mumblecore delivery, gives it his best shot but he’s miscast
as a super bruiser. We just don’t believe he’s that tough. In contrast, Woody
Harrelson steals the picture as Harlan DeGroat, the crazy drug dealer who force-feeds
his date a hotdog during the opening drive-in scene. We’ve seen Harrelson do
crazy-eyed lunacy before, but here he manages to out-intimidate himself. It’s a
rivetting performance and the picture only really kicks into gear when he’s
around.
Furnace is
littered with good actors in small, unrewarding roles. Dafoe is ever watchable.
Forrest Whitaker must have wanted to work with Cooper badly, as he hardly
needed to show up for the non-plum part of the local police chief. Likewise Zoe
Saldana as Russell’s ex. Then there’s the great Sam Shepard as the Russells’ Uncle
Gerald. Bale is typically sincere and determined, but there really isn’t much
to get worked up about in Russell. He’s well-meaning (paying off his brother’s
debts), makes mistakes (getting over-the-limit, not thinking through the
consequences of luring DeGroat into his trap), but is stoically dull.
Like Killing them
Softly, the film picks up at Obama’s first election, although this appears
only as a means to gauge how long Russell is in stir for (that said, I’m not
clear if this is set mainly in the present day; I don’t think we find out how
long he’s incarcerated). Cooper seems to want to make all sorts of
commentaries, but cant disguise how this breaks down into a simple revenge
thriller with some fairly unlikely developments along the way. He makes heavy
weather of certain sequences too. The intercutting between Russell and Gerald
going hunting (invoking The Deer Hunter)
and Rodney preparing for his fight is excruciating and banal. There’s the
occasional inspired moment – a SWAT team approaching through a quiet field – but
they are few and far between. Whatever themes Cooper is aiming for, he misses.
There’s no discernable debate on the rights and wrongs of Russell’s violence path,
or no more than in your average thriller.
Indeed, Furnace takes its merry time to reach a conclusion,
and one can’t help but wonder what it was all in aid of. Cooper is keen on
verisimilitude in performance and location, but his plotting actively works
against this. It is neither weighty not insightful, and some elements, such as
the PTSD, are so obvious as to be near glib. Cooper’s languorous filmmaking
style suited Crazy Heart, but here he
comes unstuck. Out of the Furnace is
neither fish nor fowl, not smart enough to reach for some sort of hallowed Winter’s Bone status and not nearly
hokum enough to have a good time with its revenge plot (Harrelson at least
knows he is in the latter movie). This doesn’t bode well for Cooper’s next, Black Mass with Johnny Deep Whitey
Bulger. This is one of those movies few will remember; neither especially good nor
bad, it is only the casting that sustains interest. Still, if you have a rep as
an actor’s director (Cooper is also an a thesp) you’ll probably attract names
no matter how mediocre the results are.
**1/2
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