We Own the Night (James Gray, 2007)

James Gray opens We Own the Night with a brief montage of gritty black-and-white still photographs of policemen in the late 1980s. These photos could be a time-capsule for a pre-Giuliani New York, still dangerous, still filthy. Still human, too: a photo of a cop jokingly playing with a finger puppet policeman with a gun breaks up the severe tone of the other stills and seems as foreign to the city as it exists now as the grime that got swept away to make way for hiked rents. But this montage also makes the introduction of Joaquin Phoenix's club owner, Bobby Green, that much more striking. Gray cuts suddenly to the actor in a florid red silk shirt, walking in slow-motion toward the moll (Eva Mendes) lazing on his gold-colored couch in a gold-colored frame. It is the flip-side of the stark photographs' depiction of New York sleaze, the color-drenched euphoria of those who rule as banal warlords over their turf, however small it is.

The juxtaposition of this sweltering, stylish melodrama with the earlier, ascetic realism likewise offers a clue into Gray's approach for the film: always intimately focused with fly-on-the-wall shots that capture the smallest expressions on an actor's face, but framed epically in the style of Michael Cimino or Francis Ford Coppola. Family, whether biologically programmed for manually collected, is as key to Gray's film as it is to The Deer Hunter The Godfather, films whose opening weddings lend to the start of We Own the Night its languid observation and outsized scope. This director moves faster than the other two, quickly laying out who links up to whom, but he displays the same patience for the minute revelations of character communicated by interaction and shot placement. Gray establishes Bobby as stiffly cordial with his father and brother, Burt (Robert Duvall) and Joe (Mark Wahlberg) Grusinsky, police officers both, but familial with the Russian mobster, Marat, who owns Bobby's club. Gray's next film would be Two Lovers, and this just as easily might have been called Two Families. The care Gray takes in setting up Bobby's complicated relationships with both parties makes the later narrative developments natural outgrowths of a fully realized situation rather than the simple genre mechanics they may initially seem.

Consider how Gray fleshes out Bobby's split loyalties. An early scene shows Bobby sitting down with Marat and Marat's wife for dinner. The old couple could not be more welcoming: Marat speaks to the young man as if he were a son, while the old woman fusses about trying to get him to eat one more bite as Bobby sheepishly laughs and declines politely. It has all the warmth missing from Bobby's subsequent meeting with his real father and brother, whose dark blue uniforms reflect their cool emotions on the color spectrum. When Bobby takes Amada to meet his family, Gray films the officers in an extreme long shot looking down from where the couple enter, the small but dense crowd of people leaving a blotch of ink in one corner where the officers stand rigidly. This shot also contrasts with a similar but hedonistically scaled shot back in the club, as many more patrons crush together with grasping hands reaching up at topless dancers in a sleazy recollection of the pyramid of men rising toward Brigitte Helm in Lang's Metropolis.

Yet Gray also suggests contradictory moods underneath these images. The stoic cops may suck the life out of Phoenix's Bacchanalian swagger, but they also attempt to make him part of the family by asking for his help in taking down Marat's nephew, Vadim. Bobby, naturally, refuses, unwilling to sell out the gangster both to save his own skin and out of genuine affection for his new family. Even that earlier, welcoming scene with Marat, however, betrays a truth Bobby might not want to face: nice as the old man is, he still controls Bobby, and all that the young man thinks is his is simply on loan. Much as Bobby delights in heading over to meet with his boss, he is still going to kiss the ring and pay his tribute.

So delicately is this character web spun that Gray takes a great risk funneling it into a genre story of cops and criminals that puts Bobby through the ringer to test his allegiances. When Joe carries out his raid of Bobby's club to arrest Vadim, he sets in motion a spate of reprisals that reveal the mercilessness of Bobby's second family and force him to choose which family to betray and which to support. And as he slowly returns to the side of the law as the prodigal son, Bobby finds himself caught up in stings, shootouts, protection programs and chases that seem worlds away from the stately, minutiae-obsessed opening.

Nevertheless, the inner conflict introduced in the first act inform even the most action-packed moments. Gray elides around typical suspense, playing with expectations of protracted narrative setups. Joe tells Bobby at the start that he is planning to raid his brother's club and arrest his associates, and Bobby scarcely has time to get back to his business before the cops come storming in. Likewise, the director does not string out the mob's push back against Joe, instead cutting almost immediately to the revenge. Yet this makes the attack as surprising for the viewer as it is for Joe, who does not even get the chance to fear for his life until the gun is pointed at his head.

Gray cares less for the tension than the payoff, which he films in moral terms. By not making an entire sequence of Joe being stalked, cornered and shot, he places everything in the split-second look of shock, terror and grim resignation that cross Wahlberg's face before the trigger is pulled. During a car chase between Vadim and a police-transported Bobby and Amada, Gray's kinetic editing spares three or four seconds to watch over Phoenix's soldier out the back window to see a civilian car swerving under a jackknifed semi. The shot allows us to see the crush of metal and the probable death but swivels back to face forward before the vehicle can even come to its full, sickening stop.

Most impressive is the sting that gets Bobby into this mess in the first place. The most traditionally suspenseful sequence of the film, the sting lets the threat of Bobby's exposure as a wired mole hang over his drug deal, but Gray manages to change up even this familiar trope when the deal, as it always must, goes bad. The only thing scarier than Bobby's discovery in this scene is the police's rescue, framed via a burst of machine gun fire flashing in a pitch-black doorway and indiscriminate in its killing. Bobby himself has to fling himself out of a window onto a chain-link fence to escape certain death, but not before one of the mobsters gets his head blown apart right over the man, splashing him with blood in a shot that captures every line of terror and revulsion on Phoenix's face. Violence, as Gray films it, has real consequences; much as the film concerns Bobby, We Own the Night also plays on Wahlberg's image as a brash tough guy to make the brother's PTSD and mounting disgust with guns and danger no less harrowing.

Above all, however, this is a film about identities, wherein names still have their ancient power and one who changes his surname effectively changes his relation. When Burt and Joe try to recruit Bobby into helping them at the start, Duvall speaks his son's altered surname, Green, with a mixture of fury and deep sadness. When the boy later confesses to his dad that he has disavowed Burt and Joe to the point that the mob does not even know of their blood ties, Duvall looks as broken and defeated as he did when his subordinates previously informed him of Joe's shooting. Gray even ties occupation to identity, and Bobby's slow immersion in police activity makes for a street-level version of the grandiose, symbolic analogies Cimino and Coppola drew out of their families. We Own the Night functions on a smaller scale, but its ambition (and formal skill) is no less great, and it is another reminder that James Gray is one of our finest contemporary directors.

The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)

Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quell is a man so wracked by his carnal urges that he walks in convulsive, post-coital spasms and pants in ragged thrusts when he runs. At the conclusion of World War II, the seaman joins his comrades on a beach in the Pacific, wrestling, copulating with a woman made of sand and masturbating in a grimly violent celebration of peace. Back home, Freddie reports for a military psych evaluation, a farcical conveyor belt that feeds disturbed soldiers through a handful of perfunctory, still-new techniques in a one-size-fits-all approach to mental health. The results clearly show an unwell man, but director Paul Thomas Anderson cuts abruptly to the sailor working as a mall photographer, posing families into the waxy, beaming photos that define the period. Freddie effectively applies mortar to the bricks of postwar conformity, cementing it by turning every family into a false, overlit, eerie perfect image. Eventually, the irony gets to this loner, and he finds himself thrown into the wildernerss to drift.

Unable to fit in with even smaller communities, Freddie eventually stumbles his way to a yacht about to set sail, Anderson follows behind the man and racks the background in and out of focus, signifying Freddie's desire to be a part of the gathering on-board and his knowledge that he would not fit in. (In a less abstract way, it may also just be a visualization of Freddie's perpetual state of drunkenness, brought on by his homemade, paint-thinner-laced hooch.) Soon, Freddie wakes up in a cot on the ship, invited to meet the man in charge. The man (Philip Seymour Hoffman), does not give his name. Instead, he quizzes Freddie with a tone of disappointment, like a father whose boy has come home late. This puts Freddie at ease as much as it fills him with an embarrassment he does not typically feel as a freely fighting and fucking scoundrel. The man invites Freddie to remain with him, and the spastic, vulgar seaman soon finds himself the right-hand man in a burgeoning cult movement.

Hoffman brilliantly lays out the appeal of such a man. His booming, clear oratory stands in sharp contrast to Phoenix's jagged mumbling, and his paternalistic warmth gives outcasts all the love they never received from their actual authority figures. To divert attention from his tyrannical thought control, Hoffman's Master even lets his believers feel as if they get to contribute to the truth that he sells: when Freddie confides that he does not know what the Master is saying at one point, Hoffman responds that neither does he, which is why he needs everyone's help. But this man also relies on the unbending loyalty of others, and he can barely start a debate with a skeptic before his logical fallacies leap into full aggression. At the halfway mark, his name, Lancaster Dodd, is finally spoken by a police officer serving a warrant. The mere mention of his name momentarily breaks the spell of his omniscience as much as the fact he is being charged with a crime.

The extent of Dodd's thirst for control reveals itself in his "processing" of Freddie, a method of interrogation that crosses a psychiatric evaluation with a confessional. The processing starts benignly, with Dodd principally making Freddie repeat yes/no answers to innocuous questions with a game Freddie amiably playing along. After Freddie asks him to continue, Dodd does, and the close-ups that merely relayed a shot/reverse-shot relationship between the two men suddenly pulls back to show Dodd's head in the foreground looking at Freddie as he asks the man much more personal, penetrative questions. The shot holds on Freddie for extended lengths of time as it watches him, per Dodd's instruction, not blink as he answers. Dodd uses the exercise to strip away Freddie's boundaries, but it unmasks the Master as well, laying out plainly the manner in which he sucks in those who cannot conform to society into a life that will demand even more conformity. This agonizing scene shatters for Freddie but also cleanses him in a way the impersonal psychiatric care did not, making him feel as if he finally found a place where he belongs even as he is visibly enslaved by this new master.

From such patches of gripping material, Anderson makes...what? Rather than develop these teasingly strands of setup into a focused narrative or theme, The Master stalls out. Phoenix, so captivating as an outwardly imploding animal, does not turn his performance inward so much as he completely shuts down for periods at a time until he unleashes violence as his old self tugs at the community he feels around others for the first time. Anderson simply repeats a basic formula—Freddie acts as Dodd's most fiercely loyal follower, threatens to apostatize out of his inability to behave, then slowly comes back in with renewed faith—to the point of tedium. The metronomic wood block of Johnny Greenwood's score comes to represent the flow of the film: initially off-beat and jarring, but ultimately repetitive and directionless. Dodd gives this method purpose, the unmaking and rebuilding of converts, but he has the advantage of not ultimately caring about the meaning of his words, while Anderson seems to search for a point to all this at every turn.

The Master is a film of close-ups and almost relentlessly centered compositions, set within postwar interiors that lack the satirical claustrophobia of the decade's melodramas. Nicholas Ray, for example, used CinemaScope more for his domestic dramas than his expansive, exterior pictures, using the extra width to probe the confined bourgeois space around the actors, finding emotional voids in consumerist milieux that only drove those who resided in them to dizzying heights of uncontrollable feelings. Nothing exists in Anderson's close-ups outside the faces, initially captivating (especially Phoenix's, with one side slack and the whole of it criss-crossed with lines and a cleft-lip scar), but eventually powerless through overuse. The detail of the shots is undeniably gorgeous, but compositionally, this is easily Anderson's weakest outing, as well as that of cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr., who previously brought formal dazzle to Francis Ford Coppola's digital comeback films.

But perhaps the static, centered frames and languid pace of the film serve to reflect the nature of Dodd's approach, seemingly ordered by logic and rationality but, as Dodd's son would say of his father, "making it up as he goes along." The Master itself operates like a cult, introducing tantalizing tidbits of information presented in an aesthetically pleasing manner. When it comes time to link these pieces together under a cogent, unified philosophy, however, the film leaves only blanks. All the better to lure in the sufficiently intrigued to fill in those blanks with whatever they please, strengthening their bond to the material by making them think what they brought to the movie was there all along. A scene in The Master actually illustrates this: Dodd, in a literal song-and-dance moment to hook his assembled followers, soft shoes around a parlor singing to his guests before the camera cuts to Freddie watching. Cut back to Dodd, and now all the women in the room are stark naked, standing around the Master in a carnal, if still banal, paradise. Constantly cautioned away from his base, "animal" instincts by Dodd, Freddie nevertheless sees the perfect fulfillment of the Cause as Dodd, merry and warm, speaking to a whole room and yet just to him, and a bevy of female flesh to sate his hunger. Similarly, the directionless drift of Anderson's film can be ignored and indeed even repurposed to suit the needs and observations of any viewer who chooses to project into its void.

The muddled themes of the film recall There Will Be Blood in the manner in which it presents two main interpretations: one social, one intimate, both half-baked. The Master both is an isn't a critique of cults and the manner in which this country and its social orchestration facilitates such organizations. Hoffman's subtle snake-oil salesman touches (the constant greasing of his hair into place, his close relationship with Freddie, who effectively makes his own snake oil) hint at a nuanced skewering of such a figure, but Anderson focuses on Dodd's fickle servant so completely that Freddie's constant temptation away from the Cause undermines its foundation as an infectious, consuming idea for social outliers, making the fanatical loyalty of Amy Adams' Mrs. Dodd and Laura Dern's devotee seem airdropped into the film for effect rather than a developed. As a much simpler story of a father-son/master-pupil/Platonic lover relationship, The Master treads such predictable ground that that the "insert profundity here" gulfs it leaves amid Phoenix and Hoffman's most focused scenes serve only to destroy the film's already shaky momentum.

Anderson's work constantly tugs between the juvenile and frenetic and the mature and analytical. The Master makes this split the foundation of its narrative. But by separating out these elements so fully into each lead, the director leaves a hole between these attitudes that only widens and widens as the film wears on. Not until the end do the two fully join for a tossed-off but wickedly brilliant dénouement in which Freddie uses Dodd's processing method as foreplay, debasing the mind control exercise even as he inadvertently reveals that is all the process ever was from the start. It is the most devilishly clever moment of the entire film and, placed of the film, almost gives the impression that The Master was building it all along. But then, it's easy to write to a punchline, less so to craft the setup to get to it.