Wednesday, April 26, 2017

The Devil's Own 1997

This is the last film directed by Alan J Packula and the last film shot by cinematography legend Gordon Willis. They collaborated on intense classics like All The King's Men and The Parallax View and much more modest 90s thrillers like Consenting Adults and The Pelican Brief. His later films are very imperfect but informed alot of my opinion of commercial film as a kid. I watched most if not all of The Devil's Own as a kid and I remember how much its style fit the era and the popular taste. Drab but beautifully done "mature" thrillers.

The best of his later films is Presumed Innocent starring Harrison Ford in a very layered and unsavory role as an adulterous lawyer accused of murdering his mistress. Based off of that I revisited The Devil's Own as it stars Ford again, this time co-starring a young Brad Pitt. I had high hopes as the plot is fairly juicy: Pitt's young Irish mobster moves in with Ford's older NYPD Sargent. Like other Packula films, there's a big political landscape framing the action and character tension. Brad  turns out to be a freedom fighter. The real world angle of the Provisional Irish Republican Army's conflict with Britain is before my time and is only covered in this film quickly and in muddled fashion. Weaknesses in Packula's work become evident when reflecting on the similar flat political narration in his best films. It was obvious from the start of King's Men that Woodward and Bernstein are the good guys and Nixon is a snake because it was common knowledge. But using topical subjects and instant recognition hurts future viewers. The story dramatizes the sympathetic position Pitt is in by opening the film with his father's murder but its not a significant explanation as to why he is now essentially a terrorist. We see his enemies are very corrupt officials and we dislike them, but Pitt is still only barely likeable.

As the story progresses he becomes likeable through his bond with Ford's family. There is some unbelievably heavy handed foreshadowing that the two will clash and that Pitt will lose, erasing any suspense and adding an unrealistic supposedly poetic honor to Pitt's terrorist as he seems to know he is destined to die. It climaxes lamely with (I'm spoiling so you won't see the film or at least will know what you're in for) Pitt refusing to surrender even though he has no chance of survival, but still being forgiven because, as Ford puts it, he "never had a chance". Its a very anti-romantic (and anti-climactic) tragic ending where Pitt doesn't make the right choice and so he must die. The film sells a problematic, conservative and moronic ideology because its frankly unrealistic that Pitt wouldn't have been positively changed by the story events or seen prison as his best case scenario or at least spared Ford. Its a very overly bleak worldview that robs the audience and film of a very satisfying ending to an overly long and not so tense thriller that has bright spots and some solid lead performances (Treat Williams is excellent as the babyfaced villain) but never finds momentum or anything powerful to say or show.

There's some light gore, some lovely camerawork and the chemistry between Ford and Pitt is why you watch the thing, but it could've been so much more if the script had made more sense. Its told from a very dated, conservative, hard-boiled perspective that was appropriate in the 1970s but is terribly out of date and depressing as the Millennium concluded. Its sad to see Packula go out on his sword in this way, but I always enjoy his aesthetic and he crafts a few great scenes here. The most rewarding and prophetic scenes involve Harrison Ford on cop duty reprimanding his partners for unfairly attacking a black teenager for stealing condoms and then becoming disgusted with himself for covering up the shooting of an unarmed Hispanic suspect in the back. But Ford doesn't pay for his transgression but Pitt pays too much for his. The film fails as a tragedy and succeeds as an unintentional self-satire of what were very ignorant and rigid, I'd imagine, centrist liberal views. And that itself is very prophetic and topical to today. So its not a great film or a bad film but its relevant again as how a message and talent can be wasted like those of Hillary Clinton. Atypical Bill Clinton Era populism.

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