Who owns the night? The cops and robbers or the cowboys and Indians?

Tell you what kind of movie We Own the Night is.

It’s the kind of movie that opens with scenes of rowdy, drunken, loutish young men and leering, drunken, slutty-looking young women in a nightclub, snorting lines of coke, popping pills, and tossing back drinks and laughing too loud and too hard and then switches to a scene of middle-aged cops and their families gathered in the basement of a church for a party celebrating one of their own’s promotion to captain.  The men drink beer but they’re clearly sober.  Their wives are plain and practical-looking and have one eye on the kids at all times.  Everybody dines on macaroni and cheese served out of aluminum foil chafing dishes, and before the party really gets underway a chaplain says a prayer and the guest of honor requests a moment of silence to honor a brother officer killed in the line of duty the night before and why they’re all here instead of at the wake is never explained.

And then, as if not satisfied that you got the point of that little exercise in compare and contrast, it switches back to a scene of a group we recognize from the nightclub snorting more coke and downing more booze.  The men are more loutish, but the women are acting a little less slutty, mainly because they’re too stoned to muster the energy.  And then it switches back again to a scene of cops we recognize from the church basement hard at work at the station the next morning, planning their strategy for taking down some drug dealing kingpin, and all this switching back and forth is shot and played entirely without irony.

If you stick with it after that, what you’re in for is the kind of movie that features many intense, high-volume conversations in which one character tells another things like, “We can’t do this, it’s too dangerous!” and “We better not try that, it goes against procedure!” and “We’d better not even try that because it would be just too unbelievably stupid if we did!” and then those characters go right out and do it.

It’s the kind of movie in which one character says to a second, “You want me to take care of it?” and the second character says no, he’ll do it himself, and in the next scene the first character is doing what the second character just said he’d take care of and you find yourself shouting at the screen, What’s the matter with you people?  Aren’t you in this movie?  Aren’t you paying attention to your own scripts?

It’s the kind of movie in which a deputy chief of police gets to make up all the rules, write and rewrite the law on the spot, give conflicting and dangerous orders, and make the kind of ridiculous decisions that if he’d been in the habit of making his whole career he’d never have risen above patrolman, just so that he and the other cop characters will be where they need to be when the plot requires them to be there.

It’s the kind of movie in which a main character who has no business being there, whose job would in fact preclude him from the task, takes part in a routine witness transfer, driving the lead car himself, and riding in that car all by himself, no one riding shotgun, just so he can get himself killed at a point in the film where it’s about time for a main character like him to die so that the hero can sober up and learn his lesson and set out to inflict righteous vengeance upon the bad guys.

It’s the kind of movie in which the hero, who until he sobers up and learns his lesson, has been a coke-snorting hedonist who consorts with Russian mobsters and takes every chance he gets to insult and pick fights with his cop father and his cop brother, can within days of sobering up and learning his lesson, walk into the police station, get himself made a probationary cop on the spot, pin on his badge, strap on a gun, and walk right out to take over command of the task force that’s been chasing the mobsters who until he sobered up and learned his lesson had been his friends.

It’s the kind of movie that casts Robert Duvall and Mark Wahlberg in important roles and then gives them not much to do except look grim and growl a lot.

It’s the kind of movie that casts Joaquin Phoenix as the hero who sobers up and learns his lesson, just as he did in Walk the Line, but unlike Walk the Line makes you like him better when he was a coke-snorting hedonist refusing to sober up and learn any lessons.  Think of the movies James Cagney and Pat O’Brien did together, in which Cagney was the devil-may-care gangster with the wild smile and the look of crazy menace in his eye and O’Brien was the sober, clear-thinking, honest model of decency and reason, the cop or the priest trying to save Cagney’s soul.  Think of the movies Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy did in which they put their own stamps on the Cagney-O’Brien dynamic, with Gable as the devil-may-care good bad guy with just the right, attractive amount of lust in his heart of gold, and Tracy was the model of sexless, regular guy rectitude.  Well, in We Own the Night, Phoenix plays both parts of the dynamic—he’s a Cagney who turns into an O’Brien, a Gable who becomes a Tracy, only without O’Brien’s wit and charm and without Tracy’s strength and good humor.

We Own the Night is set in 1988, but I can’t figure out why.  There’s nothing about the story that’s peculiar to the end of the Reagan era.  There are no stylistic flourishes that identify it as an 80s period piece.  If James Gray, the director, watched any television in the 80s, it wasn’t Miami Vice.  If he saw any movies, one of them wasn’t American Gigolo.  Blondie’s on the soundtrack, but as background music, not as commentary or a signature tune.  If you miss the fact that none of the good guys have sideburns, beards, or mustaches, it could be the 70s.  If you don’t wonder why no one uses a cell phone or a lap top, it could be now.  And if you go by the plot and the way the characters act as if bound by no laws or rules or logic, it could be the 1880s.

Not the real 1880s, the movie 1880s.

Move We Own the Night back in time, take it out of New York City in the late 20th Century and set in the Dakota Territories of the 19th, and a lot of what happens will be familiar enough to seem to make sense.  Make the deputy police chief a US Marshall, the only peace officer with any authority for a hundred miles around, make his “good” son his top deputy, his “wild” son, the one who needs to learn a lesson, a saloon keeper instead of nightclub manager and take the rolled dollar bill out of his nose and put a shot glass in his hand—add in the fact that he was once a marshall or a Texas Ranger or a calvary officer or a gunslinger so that it makes sense that when he pins on his badge and straps on his revolvers the rest of the posse accepts him and turns to him for leadership---have the bad guys selling rifles and whiskey to the Indians instead of cocaine to the yuppies, and you’ve got the basics for a pretty standard western.  Call it We Own the Range and cast John Wayne as the Marshall, Montgomery Clift as the good son, Jeffrey Hunter as the wild son, give it to Howard Hawks to direct, and who’d care that none of it makes a lick of sense?

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Related reading from Turner Classic Movies:

Cagney and O'Brien in Angels With Dirty Faces.

Gable and Tracy in Boom Town and San Francisco.

John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River.

Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter in The Searchers.

And be sure to read our favorite film blogger, the Siren, on The Manliness of Montgomery Clift.

Comments

[nothstine]

Gene Siskel [I think it was] referred to this type of movie--where the plot can only move forward if everyone, at each moment of critical choice, does the stupidest and most counterintuitive thing imaginable--as the "idiot movie."

bn

[Eric k]

By coincidence I just caught this the other night as well, I also noticed that after the opening credits said 1988 there was nothing about the movie that placed it in the 80s.

Besides the plot flaws you note, my only comment is that is one of the most boring crime movies I've ever seen. Didn't help it that I saw Gone Baby Gone last week and then Michael Clayton the night after I watched it, but even without the comparisons I'd say it stunk.

[Dan Leo]

Haven't seen this one, Lance, and I don't think I'll be dashing right out to rent it. It makes you wonder if people like Duvall and Wahlberg and Phoenix even read the scripts first. It makes you wonder if the studio guys who put up the money read the script. It makes you wonder how the director got to be a director...

I thought Gone Baby Gone was chock full of outrageous implausibilities also. Sure, the acting was mostly good, the directing was good, but, I'm sorry, the script was crap.

[M. George Stevenson]

How James Gray is able to make movies -- often well-reviewed movies like Little Odessa and The Yards -- is beyond me. It makes me wonder who he's related to.

Haven't seen this one, but Little Odessa was an complete and total hash despite game performances by Max Schell and Vanessa Redgrave (whose work was chronicled in the New Yorker of all things) and a much realer-feeling than usual sex scene between Tim Roth and crazy Moira Kelly, and The Yards was so idiotically implausible, despite good reviews, that I didn't watch it to the end, which I almost never do.