THE

TUESDAY BLUES

01/20/15

 

THE DROP

It’s hard to sit through an intro like the one in The Drop and not roll your eyes a little bit. Here we go again. Once again, someone wants to prove they’ve seen the most Martin Scorsese movies, or read the most Dennis Lahane novels. The movie opens with narration from a low level hood (Bob, played by Tom Hardy), who tells us exactly what the drop is, where it takes place, and his involvement in it. We find out that his neighborhood is tough, and his life is tough, and get the impression that he might be a little tough too. It’s all incredibly familiar, and I immediately started wondering what special bells and whistles this movie would have to offer in order to separate it from the hundreds of other times I’ve watched differently titled Drops. Well…that’s not fair. The movie stars Tom Hardy and James Gandolfini, so I wasn’t wondering what the movie had to offer, but if it was going to be enough.

 

After taking 2013 off, following a comedown 2012 that involved This is War and Bane, Tom Hardy sneakily ran away with 2014, and received no accolades in the process. If Locke reconfirmed that he is one of the best actors of his generation, The Drop fits very nicely next to it. It’s not the one man show that Locke is, neither the performance nor the movie, but there’s still so much here to admire, and a lot of it is because of Hardy. He makes so many questionable choices in The Drop, from his twitchy face to his forced accent, and I spent the first thirty minutes of the movie thinking he alone could sink the entire project. By the end, though, you’re as enraptured as you always are, wondering why more actors can’t make throwaway scenes feel as important as scenes involving impassioned battlefield speeches. Bob, Hardy’s character in The Drop, doesn’t appear to be incredibly smart, or ambitious. One might assume that the character will reveal more about his personality as the movie goes on, but one also might assume that we’re stuck with a boring protagonist in a boring movie. One might assume that, if one didn’t get to watch Tom Hardy. I’m not going to reveal what, if anything, lies within the character, but you don’t need it. About midway through the movie, Bob has a beer with Nadia (Noomi Rapace), a girl he likes. Watch his reactions to her questions. Watch him try to figure out the person he needs to be in this situation, or to not reveal too much to this girl he likes. It’s a scene with no twists, or even any of the pulpy one-liners that fill out the rest of the movie, but that doesn’t stop Hardy from delivering as much information about Bob than we get in any other scene.

 

And then, of course, there’s James Gandolfini. I still believe that The Sopranos is the greatest television drama of all time, and even if you don’t think it has aged as well as I do, it’s impossible not to see its place in TV history. Tony Soprano is one of the most nuanced characters ever, and it cemented James Gandolfini’s place in the TV Hall of Fame, giving television one of its ten best performances. But there’s a part of me that would flush all of that down the toilet if we got to see Gandolfini in a wider variety of roles. His voice is always the same, his body is always the same, and his inability to breathe normally is always the same in each of his characters. But you can safely add The Drop to the criminally short list of movies like Killing Them Softly, Enough Said, In the Loop, and The Mexican that show off all of the little things he was capable of. Maybe this was because of Tony Soprano. Maybe he knew he had to work a little bit harder than chameleons like Tom Hardy, knowing that he would forever be seen in so many people’s eyes as Tony Soprano. Despite still being a criminal, Gandolfini’s Cousin Marv is the exact opposite of Tony Soprano, or maybe what Soprano would be today if things went horribly, horribly wrong. After losing his bar to Chechen (not Chechnyan) gangsters over gambling debts, Cousin Marv sulks ungracefully through the movie, clinging on to whatever reputation he has left. Every decision Cousin Marv makes is conflicted, no longer sure if he’s officially the old wash-up everyone knows he him to be, or the hardened gangster who wouldn’t take shit from anyone. Gandolfini doesn’t let a second go to waste, placing his true feelings in an instantaneous look before giving whatever watered down, neutered response he has deemed more appropriate.

 

Hardy is a lot of fun in The Drop, but this is Gandolfini’s movie, if for no other reason than he sops up your attention. He doesn’t know this will be the last time we see him, but we do, and we can’t help but take in as much as we can. The Drop works its ass off to not be another Scorsese rip-off (and if it feels like a Dennis Lehane rip-off, it should. He wrote the script based on a short story that he also wrote), and there are some decent twists and turns throughout. But I’m recommending it for knowing to cast two heavyweights, one regaining his belt, and the other giving us one last haymaker.

 

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BREAKING AWAY

Breaking Away is the kind of movie that, if you haven’t seen it before, can single-handedly ruin all of the movies you grew up liking. On the surface, it’s identical to all of the movies you grew up watching: high-school friends, turf wars, parents that just don’t understand, a big, third act competition. It’s all here. The problem with this movie its that it’s all so fucking charming, that it makes every other movie look like hackneyed garbage. This is 1979, and most of the movies that I’m thinking of came out in the 80’s and early 90’s, so it’s possible that the subsequent movies just copied Breaking Away‘s recipe with none of the skill. Either way, don’t let this be a reason to not see it. If you’re like too many people, and didn’t have this movie in your childhood rotation, move it up to the top of your queue as soon as possible.

THE PALM BEACH STORY

Although not my favorite Sturges film (I’m a Sullivan’s Travels kind of guy), The Palm Beach Story proves once and for all that watching horrible people do horrible things can be a wonderful experience, as long as Preston Sturges is writing the dialogue. Claudette Colbert (Mrs. Clark Gable) decides to leave her husband, for no other reason than he isn’t rich, and flee to Palm Beach for a quick divorce. There she meets J.D. Hackensacker III (yup), a rich tycoon who falls for her immediately. When her husband hunts her down, she convinces him to pretend to be her brother, so as to not fuck up her chances with Hackensacker. And that’s just where the crazy bullshit starts. If you’ve never seen a Preston Sturges movie before, this is a good one to start with. Travels might have more brains, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek might have more heart, and The Lady Eve might have more laughs (and Bible imagery), but Palm Beach has the most crazy.

– Ryan Haley