We Own The Night [15]

There are many reviews which have sought to devalue We Own The Night. They pick at errors in costume and music which seem out of place in the late 80s setting, the stylised nature of much of the conflict around which the film pivots and the singular morality which forms its thematic core.

As valid as these criticisms may be in a technical sense, they miss the point of the film as a whole. We Own The Night is a beautifully shot and masterfully acted work. The audience is immersed in the gritty, violent world or the NYPD and the suffocating pressure of the Grusinsky family's lives is powerfully felt. The acting, by Wahlberg and Phoenix in particular, is masterful and the moments when the visual and human elements of the film mesh best, such as the terrifying car chase-shootout or the warehouse drug bust, are a joy to witness.

The message of the film is simple: redemption comes through honesty married with sacrifice. It is not ironic or 'clever'. It is not cool or in vogue. And it is perhaps this deliberate marginalisation of thematic concerns current in Hollywood which has earned the ire of so many critics. As for the all too easy criticisms which have emerged regarding 70s and 80s period inconsistencies, they pale into insignificance when viewed alongside the self-referential attention to detail in the visual cues of the film. Joseph's (Walhberg) final scene, for example, emerging from the smoke-ruined field, the shot divided evenly between the green of the grass and the yellow of the marsh reeds above, evoking the green and gold badges of the Police Department's lapel honors is truly accomplished.

We Own The Night is a serious, heavyweight police drama. It will be increasingly lauded as the vagaries of fashion in today's filmmaking pass and are forgotten.

Rigs (Unverified), 01/01/08

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When James Gray’s We Own the Night premiered at Cannes this spring, it was ahead of Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises and Neil Jordan’s The Brave One, to name just three recent films with which it significantly crosses paths. Unfortunately, it hasn’t received a public release until after those came along and pressed fresh claims for their respective territories. And perhaps even more relevantly it comes a full thirty years after the best police dramas of Sidney Lumet, the like of which it resembles even more closely.

An opening montage of black and white photos provide context (the police of the New York Street Crime division are seen cleaning up) and an explanation of the title (a motto seen on a badge) but once these are done the film immediately gives way to core plotting with a very clear interpretation of the central thread: Joaquin Phoenix, playing high-timing Nightclub manager Bobby Green, is seen stepping forward out of the shadows. That, in essence, is what the next 110 minutes or so are going to be about.

Green is using the maiden name of his mother; he doesn’t use the family name Grusinsky as both his brother (Mark Wahlberg) and father (Robert Duvall) are prominent members of the police force. Nobody Green works with knows about his cop kin, least of all the nightclub’s owner or the members of the Russian mafia amongst his clientele. The secret is known only to his girlfriend (Eva Mendes). And thus, the deck is rigged for a melodramatic showdown and the cards are dealt when, as seemingly inevitable, Green’s brother leads a raid on the club, getting on the bad side of Bobby as well as a grudge-prone Russian gangster.

For such a 70s-influenced film, it’s just a little odd that Gray chose to set his film in the late 80s, but a whole lot more baffling is that he has then gone on to style it with so many turn-of-the-decade elements. The first song heard is Blondie’s Atomic; production design and clothing details are out of chronological joint; a radio commercial played on the soundtrack is some years out of date. It’s a puzzle as to why the film wasn’t fit to be set in the period it so clearly loves.

While there’s a lot to like in the film – the performances, Joaquin Baca-Asay’s cinematography, the basic conception of a highway showdown in sheets of heavy rain – it doesn’t add up to much more than a couple of hours of dismissible entertainment and a simplistic rehearsal at moral pondering. The comparison to the Scott and Cronenberg films may be less apt than to The Brave One as, ultimately, We Own the Night is a slightly less exploitative take on the Death Wish model, but bent around to make the boys in blue the goodies for once.

Brendon Connelly (Unverified), 06/12/07

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