The backwoods of America’s rural landscape is a terrifying
setting in the hearts and minds of moviegoers. One wrong turn off the
interstate and — BAM! — rednecks are spilling out of campers and from behind
squeaky screen doors to snarl their gummy snarls and invoke inbred Americana
terror on your citified ass.
This is why a thriller like Deliverance, with its dueling
banjoes and pig-squealing forest rape, is often considered a horror movie. It’s
just too unsettling to be just a thriller.
Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace plays on some of those
fears, fears that are based on the toothless threats lurking down those
forgotten roads and abandoned shacks deep within America’s heartland. The film
is set somewhere in the Rust Belt — Pennsylvania, I think; it’s not really clear.
We meet Russell Baze (Christian Bale), a steelworker in a shabby steel town.
Russell is entrenched in his blue-collar life: his overalls are blue, his
bedroom is blue, his truck is blue. Bale, doing his best mumblecore impression,
lets his dialogue wobble out of Russell’s mouth. Some of it is hard to
understand and, look, no subtitles.
Russell’s brother, Rodney (Casey Affleck), fresh off a tour
of duty in Afghanistan, is having a hard time coping with life outside of the
military. And he owes money all over town, including to loansharking John Petty
(Willem Dafoe), that guy locals go to when their hobbies toe the illegal line.
To pay his bills, Rodney takes up bareknuckle fights in barns and abandoned
steel plants. Only like 25 people show up to watch two scrawny fighters, not an
ounce of fat on their 120-pound frames, pummel each other into pulpy oblivion.
Economically speaking, this has to be a horrible financial investment. If any
more than about $75 is exchanged, I would be shocked. Although, judging by the crowd, maybe they make bets using raccoon skins or deer antlers or Sarah Palin trading cards.
Rodney, ignoring sage advice from dirtbag John Petty,
wanders into Pennsylvania’s backwoods, where he fixes a fight under the
direction of King Redneck Harlan DeGroat, a sadist so cunningly vile and
wretched that he even slips away from Woody Harrelson, who’s played unhinged
wackos before. Harlan DeGroat — if a belch could ever be a name, here it is —
is established as a madman in the first scene when he makes his drive-in movie
date felate a hot dog because his quota on humiliation and degradation was
apparently not yet filled for the day. Something tells me they won't be dating again.
Director Cooper has a soft affection for his subjects, even
the despicable ones. His camera wanders over faces and frames them in
interesting ways. The lighting, natural and moody, imbues the movie with a
tickle of authenticity as light dapples through windows, caresses faces and,
when required, casts unflattering shadows from above, creating deep pockets of
fear and mystery on characters’ faces. I especially liked some of the
locations: boarded up farmhouses, rusty factories, tacky wood-paneled living
rooms, and fluorescent-drenched police stations. The film just feels like
small-town America, the kind of place where John Rambo would show up and out
of spite.
The plot only materializes late in the movie, after Rodney
has thrown his fight for DeGroat — gesundheit! — and DeGroat — God
bless you — decides to enact some backwoods justice because he doesn’t like
Rodney’s attitude. Days later, Russell is told his brother is missing and
feared dead, but the police can’t do anything about it because Harlan is a
meth-cooking kingpin whose rural compound is some kind of Road Warrior-like no
man’s land. And I mention Road Warrior playfully, but also kinda seriously:
Harlan’s henchmen ride around on on a fleet of quads and ATVs, the redneck yakuza of Hicksville, USA.
The film’s biggest flaw seems to be its pacing, which
lingers and drags in places that should be taut and simply shot. The first 60
minutes of Out of the Furnace are interesting, as Rodney and Russell’s
competing personalities are introduced, but there are no morsels of story.
Nothing is established. A better movie would have set up the plot in the first
10 minutes, not the first 80. So by the time Rodney is making deals with Harlan
— and Russell is hunting Harlan down — we’re well into the third act, but with
first-act problems. This all leads up to a rather abbreviated showdown with
Russell and DeGroat — bless you — as they chase each other in a bar and then
into an abandoned steel mill, where one of them makes a decision that is required of them, but one the plot has yet to establish is necessary.
The performances are great, even Bale who underplays his
performance perfectly, and Harrelson who overplays his. Even small characters
played by Sam Shepard, Zoe Saldana and Forest Whitaker are splendid. I just
don’t think Out of the Furnace asks any of them to go far enough.
Deep down I think it wishes it
was Winter’s Bone, a much better movie, one that featured that backwoods
setting with the trailer parks and meth kitchens, cars on blocks and sofas in
the yard, and all the white lower-class desolation. Winter’s Bone wasn’t afraid
to send its characters down the rabbit hole.
Here, though, in Out of the Furnace,
neither rabbit holes nor furnaces are stepped into. The movie plays it safe and
plants its feet.
