Oren Moverman (2011)
I didn’t like the look of Rampart from the trailer or the sound of it from what I’d read. But I liked Oren Moverman’s previous movie The Messenger enough still to want to see Rampart, which Moverman co-wrote with James Ellroy. Once I started watching, I was soon bored by the material and irritated by the style of the movie. I couldn’t find a way into the story or hear much of what was being said. Walking out of the cinema halfway through a film often feels like an admission of failure but in this case it was a relief too. The ‘Rampart scandal’, according to Wikipedia, ‘refers to widespread corruption in the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) anti-gang unit of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Rampart Division in the late 1990s’. Rampart is the story of an LAPD veteran called Dave Brown, played by Woody Harrelson, who is (again according to Wikipedia) ‘forced to face up to the consequences of his wayward career’.
In The Messenger, Tony Stone, the hard-headed military man played by Harrelson, was a persuasive and moving character. He was part of an involving story and, although a powerful presence, not an overpowering one. He had less screen time than Ben Foster, who was strong in a different, complementary way. (Harrelson was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor.) In Rampart, Dave Brown is something of a kindred spirit to Tony Stone but here the character is not only centre stage but mythicised. If the script were not the work of James Ellroy, whose conservative and Christian views are well known, I might feel more sympathetic but you get the sense that Dave Brown’s cussedness and violence are meant to be expressions of a mysterious nobility – and this sense is compounded by Moverman’s admiring direction of Harrelson. The actor’s work in Rampart has been much admired by critics too, and it is a performance of great commitment, but I found it overbearing – even though this may be the fault of Moverman, who seems anxious to give weight to every moment of the performance, as much as of Harrelson.
Moverman does the same with Ned Beatty, as some old-timer who knew Dave’s father. Although Beatty too is very good, the camera’s concentration on him seems to be insisting that he’s great – much of the film takes place in darkness, literal as well as metaphysical, so when the actors’ faces are lit it’s artificially conspicuous. In a sequence involving Woody Harrelson, Steve Buscemi and Sigourney Weaver, however, the camera movement and editing are so attention-grabbing that they overpower three very good actors. I thought Weaver was the best thing in the forty-five minutes I stayed for – not just because she’s clearly audible but because she brings an interesting quality of weariness to the professional woman she’s playing (though I never worked what the woman’s job was exactly). James Ellroy is famous for the brevity of his prose but Dave Brown has the odd outburst of wordiness: your initial reaction is surprise but then you realise Dave is making fun of people who use big words and/or jargon (which seem to be considered the same thing). The cast also includes Ice Cube, Anne Heche, Cynthia Nixon and Robin Wright.
15 March 2012
