Review: "The Drop"

"The Drop" is an intriguing, atypical movie. It starts out with a lot of disparate characters and story elements, some of them related, much of it not. Over time they gradually float towards each other, each piece locking into place in a way that might not have seemed obvious at first.

The experience of watching it is like stumbling upon a disassembled pocket watch, and then witnessing the little gears and springs drag themselves, with almost gravitational pull, into a cohesive whole again. The actual process of putting itself back together can be a bit tedious at times, but at some point everything clicks together.

This is another film based on the writings of Dennis Lehane, who also penned the screenplay. Movies based on his work have been up ("Gone Baby Gone"), down ("Shutter Island") and vastly overhyped ("Mystic River"). Here is a film that seems to contain the Lehane mythos boiled down to its inky essence. The story happens almost entirely inside one seedy bar, and the few frozen city blocks around it.

Tom Hardy plays Bob Saganowsky, who sloshes drinks at Cousin Marv's Bar. Bob speaks in a clinched little croak, almost whiny; he isn't terribly bright and is passive almost to the point of transparency. There are rough types who come into the bar, and some try to get a rise out of Bob, but they leave unsatisfied, because it's like kicking a sweet puppy who only comes back for more.
He is, in short, a mook.

Cousin Marv is mostly a figurehead these days, an aging hulk who barely moves from his corner table. His name's on the bar, and he used to run a little action on the side -- he was, he says, somebody who made people sit up when he walked in. But he got pushed by some tougher Chechen mobsters, and flinched, and now it's their bar and he just runs it.

James Gandolfini could play controlled rage better than just about anybody, so Marv is a fitting final screen role for him.

The title comes from the process of picking one bar at random to be the place where all the gambling and other dirty money winds up for the night -- "the safe for the entire city." It soon becomes clear that somebody's looking to hit Marv's the night it's the drop, and Bob gets caught up in the tide of events.

One night Bob is walking home from work and comes across a bloodied puppy dumped in a trash can. The woman who lives there, a waitress named Nadia (Noomi Rapace), helps him patch the dog up, but insists Bob adopt him as his own. He blanches at first, but finally takes on the little pitbull, whom he dubs Rocco. This is, for him, a major addition to his tiny universe, which essentially consists of just the bar and keeping up his dead parents' tidy brownstone.

Accepting the responsibility of the dog changes something in Bob ... or does it? Hardy's performance is one poker face behind another, so we're never quite sure what's going on the other side of that lunkhead mien. Dribs and drabs of information leak out to suggest there's more there. He and Nadia start seeing more of each other, hesitatingly -- it's like two wounded animals sniffing the other's wounds.

Other characters' orbits intersect with that of the bar. There's a perpetually smiling police detective (John Ortiz) who sees Bob at the same church every morning, and wonders why he never takes communion. He starts investigating a stick-up at the bar, and then noses into old crimes that have become part of the neighborhood lore.

There's Eric Deeds (an imposing Matthias Schoenaerts), a hustler with a past connected to Nadia. He casts a baleful eye at Bob for seemingly mysterious reasons, stopping by the bar or his house, claiming Rocco is actually his dog, and dropping idle threats. (Somehow, he makes an umbrella seem weapon-like.)

And then we have the Chechen boss, Chovka, chillingly played by Michael Aronov. He expects Marv and Bob to recover the money stolen during the robbery. You can see the wheels turn in Bob's head, slowly, and in Marv's head, slightly less slowly -- if they could find the money, wouldn't that imply they were in on the job?

Director Michaël R. Roskam takes his time -- too much, really -- building up the suspense, but the plot of "The Drop" eventually gets there.

Review: "Animal Kingdom"

The boys of the Cody clan are facing the end of days. Their zenith as Australia's most notorious bank robbers has passed, with the corrupt Melbourne police no longer willing to look the other way in exchange for some fat envelopes. "Pull your heads in," advises one still-friendly detective.

The Codys do not pull their heads in, because that is not who the Codys are. Here is who the Codys are: When volatile Craig Cody (Sullivan Stapleton) gets flipped off by some punks at a stoplight, he pursues them into an alley, hands a pistol to his teen nephew Joshua (James Frecheville) and orders him, "Let 'em know who's king."

"Animal Kingdom," the tense, gritty crime thriller from Oz is the story of Joshua, and what it's like to be suddenly thrust into a family that nourishes itself on fear instead of love. He's afraid of the cops, but even more terrified of his crazy uncles -- especially the oldest and craziest, Andrew "Pope" Cody (a chilling, unhinged Ben Mendelsohn).

Writer/director David Michôd constructs a slippery narrative that consistently fools the audience about where the movie is heading. The result is part "Donnie Brasco," part "Godfather" and more than a little bit Ma Barker.

For those who don't remember Ma Barker, she was the mother of a similar brood of killers during the 1930s, until she and her son Fred were gunned down in what is still the longest shoot-out in FBI history. The legend has long persisted that Ma secretly ran the gang, since lawmen would not suspect a grandmotherly figure of orchestrating kidnappings and murders.

Her myth has been fodder for several movies over the years, most famously "White Heat" starring James Cagney.

(Interesting aside: For several years I lived next door to the house where the Barker shoot-out took place. The same family that rented it to the Barkers still owns it. They fixed most of the bullet holes but left a few for nostalgia. An annual recreation of the gunfight is the height of the social season.)

The "Ma" character here is played by Jacki Weaver, as a smiling, pleasant-looking woman of late middle years who seems to be the calm at the center of the storm of criminal activity all around here. Her sons show up on her doorstep, often drugged up or on the lam, and she offers a cheerful grin and something to eat.

Ma Cody welcomes the arrival of her grandson Joshua, or "J", after his mother overdoses on heroin. He becomes a witness and unwilling participant in their cycle of crime. Over time, it becomes clear to J -- and the audience -- that his grandmother is much more than an enabler in denial.

Besides Pope and Craig, there's Darren (Luke Ford), who's only a little older than J and still has some of his innocence, too. Barry "Boz" Brown (Joel Edgerton) is an extended member of the family who recognizes that the criminal life pays only short-term dividends. He urges Pope to put his money in the stock market, and by Pope's bewildered reaction we can see it's like telling a wolf not to hunt.

Guy Pearce has a terrific role as Nathan Leckie, the detective tasked with bringing the Cody boys in. Leckie quickly zeroes in on J as the weak link, and pursues him with a relentless professionalism that borders on friendliness. He doesn't use threats, just logic and patience.

Leckie recognizes the corruption and abuse that exists within law enforcement, and works to nudge things in the right direction as much as his position will allow. Given the brutal way police are often depicted in "Animal Kingdom," his even-keeled pragmatism gives him an almost heroic aura.

The film is certainly worthwhile, though I found a few pieces missing. J remains too much of a blank slate throughout the movie, but by the end we're supposed to believe he has absorbed all the lessons that both cops and robbers had to teach him. It's never a good thing when your main character is the least interesting person on the screen.

3 stars after four