War on Everyone

John Michael McDonagh’s third film as writer/director attempts to mash up the concerns of his first two films, The Guard and Calvary, with intermittent success.

Terry Monroe (Alexander Skarsgard) is rarely sober. His work buddy Bob Bolano (Michael Pena) is rarely polite. But that doesn’t matter because they literally have a get out of jail free card, they’re cops. But they won’t be cops for much longer if Lt. Stanton (Paul Reiser) doesn’t see them rein in the lunacy. Dialling down the public drunkenness and excessive force is a huge ask when Terry and Bob stumble, via their CI Reggie (Malcolm Barrett), onto a complicated heist. Dazzled by the prospect of acquiring riches; and on Terry’s part, Jackie (Tessa Thompson), a moll at a loose end; the dirty duo unwittingly put themselves in the bad books with an unlikely mastermind after one beating a suspect mercilessly too far. Lord James Mangan (Theo James) is the nemesis fate has set up for these cheerfully corrupt detectives.

War on Everyone does not live up to the high expectations held for it as while it features any number of hilarious lines and ideas it never truly gels. It doesn’t rattle along like an absurdist procedural with philosophical tangents, but it isn’t an episodic tale in service of a larger philosophical meditation either, so it falls between the two stools of The Guard and Calvary. Lorne Balfe’s score is heroically in thrall to 1970s brass, funk and bombast, while Terry’s preoccupation with Glen Campbell finds full tuneful fulfilment on the soundtrack. The New Mexico locations are strikingly captured by Oren Moverman’s regular cinematographer Bobby Bukowski, a highlight being a distant tracking shot capturing Skarsgard chasing a perp. And in a delirious scripting touch Terry’s constant outrageous drinking is shown wreaking havoc on his memory and his ability to work.

War on Everyone is a memorable film, not a great one, but a patchwork that uses to the full its licence to offend is preferable to any cookie-cutter banality.

3.5/5

Time Out of Mind

Actor/producer Richard Gere teams up with The Messenger writer/director Oren Moverman for a portrait of homelessness in New York City.

George (Gere) is rudely awakened from his slumber in a bathtub by Frank (Steve Buscemi) and thrown out of an apartment that his friend Sheila has been evicted from. George is a nuisance in Frank’s eyes, in fact he’s a nuisance to most people. Nurse Maire (Geraldine Hughes) tells him he can sleep in the ER waiting room but an orderly countermands her compassion. Private schoolboys and frat boys mock and prank George when he’s at his most vulnerable. His estranged daughter Maggie (Jena Malone) can’t stand the sight of him. When he falls at his feet at a shelter he’s quickly intimidated by the younger, physically stronger Jack (Jeremy Strong). But there he also makes an unlikely friend, former jazz musician and current garrulous optimist Dixon (Ben Vereen). Can Dixon steer George back on to the straight and narrow?

That description makes Time Out of Mind sound almost plot-driven. It’s not. To a fault. At an ADIFF Q&A last week actor/producer Gere was proud of how he and Moverman had worked hard to strip away almost all elements of plot from the movie. There is no true arc nor backstory. We begin abruptly in media res ,and our feelings of disorientation are heightened by a chaotic sound mix; reflecting the long-lens cinematography of Bobby Bukowski that captures from afar the astonishing verite of real people blanking Richard Gere because of his shabby apparel, as well as emulating 1960s anti-Magnum photography by wrapping images in and thru reflections. But this lack of backstory greatly hurts the father/daughter dynamic. Without context Maggie appears hypocritical and narcissistic, her repeated ‘What else?’ reminiscent of and as irritating as Diane Keaton’s ‘As what?’ refrain in Reds.

Time Out of Mind lacks the bravura camerawork Bukowski and Moverman deployed on 2011’s Rampart, but there are numerous long-takes that are so unobtrusive you start with surprise when you suddenly realise that minutes have passed without a cut. Gere doesn’t match the recent gold standard of his barnstorming turn in Arbitrage, because he’s essentially a passive, if occasionally self-destructive, figure. Instead Vereen remains long in the memory. His Dixon is a comic creation given to lengthy monologues, but also gifted incredibly affecting notes of despair and delusion that come to a head when he hesitates agonisingly over playing an out of tune piano. Moverman’s previous directorial effort Rampart was just as much a character study, but it was driven by a ferociously complex and layered character actively moving through a reasonably fleshed out plot. Moverman’s pared back too much…

Time Out of Mind is that most frustrating of things: an important film. It’s incredibly depressing, paints a not too rose-tinted picture of urban homelessness, and is exceptionally well-intentioned. It’s just not great film-making.

3/5