FILM REVIEW: RAMPART

Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) in Rampart.

Culturally bred killer

By Ed Rampell

Character studies can simply be presented as straightforward dramas. Or they can be encoded in genre conventions, which might improve their box office heft with the multiplex popcorn crowd. For instance, on the surface Bridesmaids is a wild and crazy comedy about females behaving badly. However, it is also -- or really -- about commitment-phobic, lonely, aging Annie Walker (Kristen Wiig) and her problems relating to and connecting with lovers and friends.

In the same way, Oren Moverman’s Rampart is about a bad cop behaving badly and worse. “Date Rape” Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) is enmeshed in police department corruption on steroids, specifically the “Rampart scandal” that shook the anti-gang unit of LAPD’s Rampart Division in the late 1990s. Brown operates within the framework of police brutality gone berserk, as the men in blue willy-nilly pummeled suspects black and blue, planted evidence such as illegal drugs, peddled narcotics and perpetrated one of the worst, most far reaching cases of proven police misconduct in U.S. history. Indeed, instead of “serving and protecting” the Rampart section of Los Angeles, the criminal LAPD officers who ran amok were way worse than gangbangers, as they were protected by badges and uniforms, and our man Brown seems like one of the most rabid of these mad dogs in blue.

However, beneath the surface, Harrelson is providing an intimate portrayal of a man who is undergoing a severe midlife crisis. Indeed, Brown, who is a military (perhaps Vietnam?) veteran, is coming apart at the seams. Both his professional and private life is falling apart. His unusual living arrangement with, if I understood correctly, both of his ex-wives -- who are, strangely enough, also sisters -- Cynthia Nixon (Sex in the City’s Miranda) and Anne Heche (co-star of another HBO comedy, Hung), is likewise disintegrating.

To be fair to the bedeviled Brown, he does strive to be a good father to his daughters, little Margaret (Sammy Boyarsky) and teenager Helen (Brie Larson), who creates sexually charged artwork that would make a Madonna backup dancer, well, backup, and whose sexual preference, Rampart suggests, is being shaped by her ne’er do well dad.

Like a latter day John Wayne character, Brown lives by a moral code, believing that “soldiers” like him are part of the thin blue line, all that’s standing between law abiding citizens and the jungle out there. Like the Duke in innumerable Westerns, Brown’s vision of his role is racially tinged. What Brown fails to realize is that his Tarzan is worse than the “apes” who may be swinging on the vines of the banyan trees.

Although he’s clearly an antihero at best, what mitigates Harrelson’s character is that he picks up and beds attractive women (Audra McDonald and Robin Wright) during the course of the movie. Nothing warms the cockles (so to speak) of the male moviegoer’s heart more than onscreen masculine conquests, so this makes the mostly despicable Brown more appealing. However, upon closer inspection, his relationships with these women, as with his ex-wife sisters (and daughters) ranges from alienation (from Sartre to Camus to Genet on the estrangement scale) to tortured.

Harrelson’s acting ranges, like his character, from over the top to nuanced, and the now 50-plus actor’s body fits Brown’s persona, as an aging man who has seen better days and is losing his grip. In addition to Harrelson giving one of his best performances ever, the topnotch cast also includes Steve Buscemi and Sigourney Weaver as civilians who try to rein in the out of control Brown’s reign of terror and Ned Beatty as a onetime dirty cop (now a filthy ex-cop). Ice Cube plays the inevitable Internal Affairs-type investigator who tries to nail Harrelson’s wayward peace officer. Ben Foster, who co-starred with Harrelson in Moverman’s outstanding 2009 antiwar drama The Messenger, has a small role, if not a cameo, rather craftily playing a wheelchair-bound veteran.

Helming his second feature, Moverman proves himself once again to be a director of conscience, consciousness and cinematic ability. Rampart has great close-ups (including opening shots that evoke Brown’s hard ass persona) and a good use of subjective camera. Moverman goes all sixties cinema in a freewheeling sex club scene that reminded me of the Warholian party in 1969’s Midnight Cowby; I half expected Dustin Hoffman to appear, denouncing: “Wackos! They’re all a bunch of wackos!” Moverman’s movies move.

He also co-wrote the script with James Ellroy (1997’s L.A. Confidential), no stranger to the cops gone bad genre. In 1969, New York Mayor John Lindsay assigned NYPD brass and officers to see Costa-Gavras’ classic Z which, among other things, deals with police excessive use of force. Here’s hoping Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will likewise make Rampart required viewing for all of those city officials who ordered law enforcers to raid the Occupy L.A. encampment at City Hall, along with the 1,400 LAPD pigs and others who participated. Perhaps a few light bulbs may go off above the heads of the police force notorious for its history of excessive use of force: Brutalizing Rodney King; cowardly fleeing L.A. when rioters outnumbered and outgunned them; perpetrating the Rampart scandal; assaulting innocent demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention; attacking journalists and peaceful protesters at a May Day rally; laying siege to Occupy L.A.; etc. Yes, “o’er the ramparts we watched, were so ungallantly streaming…”

   

     

     

  

TRIBECA 2011: NEDS

Canta (Gary Milligan) and Young John McGill (Conor McCarron) in Neds.

Crass beginnings

By Don Simpson

Non-Educated Delinquents (NEDs) — you know the youthful ruffians who continue to infest Britain’s cities and towns, prowling around like packs of wolves, wreaking havoc upon their economically-ravaged estates. Today they are caricatured by some British media outlets as “Hoodies" and they exemplify the nation’s evil that David Cameron and his ilk used as political leverage to overtake the Labour Party in the 2010 elections.

Writer-director Peter Mullan’s Neds begins in Glasgow in the early 1970s as John McGill (Gregg Forrest) graduates junior school at the top of his class. Summer comes and goes and John arrives at St. John’s only to discover, much to his visible dismay, that he has been placed in the school’s second-tier 1A2 class. The headmaster informs John that if he becomes one of the top two students in the 1A2 class come December, he will be bumped up to 1A1. John’s brutish 1A2 teacher ridicules him, challenging John’s lofty expectations of rising above the mediocrity of the 1A2 class. John also discovers that he must prove to his headmaster and teachers that he is more than just “the wee brother" of Benny (Joe Szula). Benny terrorized (and tagged) St. John’s during his abbreviated tenure there; now he is a much feared leader of a local NED gang, the Car-D’s.

Of course, John does rise above the rest and is promoted to the 1A1 class but, even then, his 1A1 instructors mock him. For example, when John scores a 100 per cent on a Latin exam, his teacher (Steven Robertson) teases him for being such a swot in a feeble attempt to defuse John’s classmates’ attempts of doing the same. It is that very same Latin teacher who suggests that John attend summer school in order to stay out of trouble and that is where John befriends a teen of a much higher economic class. When John tells his new friend’s mother that he wants to attend University but does not know which subject he aspires to study, the mother pegs John as a NED and exiles him from stepping into their posh, upper class abode ever again.

Distraught from his first real encounter with the rigid class divisions of British society — and now totally friendless — John begins a slow downward spiral from a sweet and tender kid to rough and tumble hooligan. (“In the midst of life we are in debt, etc…”) John was quite obviously preordained to become a NED, and he has no choice but to devolve into one. It is not John’s unwillingness to learn that forces him to become a NED, rather it is society’s unwillingness to teach him anything other than the hard knocks.

This is as good of a time as any to discuss John’s home life. His alcoholic father (Peter Mullan) wears “abusive parent and spouse” proudly upon his booze-drenched sleeves, but the domestic violence is only ever implied by the father’s late night calls of “Get down here right now, cow!” to John’s oh-so-meek mother (Louise Goodall). The one and only advantage of being from a working class family is that John qualifies for provy checks.

So, who is to blame for John’s devolution? Mullan lines up the usual (and valid) suspects: the Catholic Church, evil school teachers, the police, teenage masculinity and rebellion, the British class/caste system, and society as a whole. There is also the allure of gang culture for friendship and protection, as well as the adrenaline rush of the chase and the fight.

Mullan has admitted that some of the scenes in Neds are adapted from his own personal experiences, which lends a certain authenticity to the film. Visually and dramatically, Neds owes a lot to British neo-realism (a.k.a. kitchen sink cinema). Too bad the plot is so purposefully and predictably structured. Neds also focuses way too much on the male perspective — the females are given very little to do or say, lending them a very mannequin-like existence. Most frustrating, however, is Mullan’s pathetic foray into the overt dramatization of Catholic guilt, with the hallucinogenic vision (as a result of sniffing glue) of a crucified Christ coming alive and beating some sense into John.