Dragged across Concrete is prescient 2018 neo-noir directed by S. Craig Zahler and starring Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn. The film is controversial and has been accused of racism. Certainly, it has some politically incorrect dialogue in the movie's first half hour, apparently a deliberate provocation, but, of course, it's unclear whether the attitudes expressed in the script are endorsed by the film or, ultimately, refuted by them. It's tricky to ascribe political ideology to a movie based on a character's dialogue; after all the allegedly offensive dialogue could be satiric or implicitly critical of the character uttering the words. In this case, I would guess that the director and his cast probably intended the politically incorrect material as a prefatory statement of principles -- I base this view on the casting of Mel Gibson in the film, clearly a provocation in its own right, and on Zahler's previous film, Bone Tomahawk, a horror-Western in which Zahler invents a tribe of troglodyte cannibal savages to play the part ordinarily inhabited by Apaches or the Sioux in old movies -- that is, the role of the implacable, stoic, and murderous savage, a part that current ideology has exiled into zombie and red-neck killer movies. When watching Bone Tomahawk a few years ago, I dutifully ticked-off the standard Western imagery usually investing Native American warriors but, now, displaced onto murderous, torturing cannibals of some unknown cultural provenance. Obviously Zahler wanted to make a standard Western but felt hamstrung by politically correct attitudes about Native Americans. In Dragged across Concrete, Zahler resurrects hoary law-and-order tropes in which hardnosed but virtuous cops are hampered in the performance of their appointed duties by the liberal media and the courts. This is Magnum Force and Dirty Harry stuff, although I can attest to the accuracy of the sentiments on display in the film, perspectives that have been expressed to me with some vehemence by actual sworn officers of the law. This is a sense of victimhood, an idea that "politicians" don't support the cops, an idea that niceties of Civil Rights law ultimately serve the bad guys and subvert the police whose methods may be esthetically unpleasant but whose hearts are in the right place. That said, the film's provocations are swiftly absorbed into what turns out to be a standard, if very effectively, presented noir heist film.
Dragged across Concrete begins with a narrative strategy that characterizes the entire movie. We start in media res (with a sex scene) -- a character is introduced by subtle clues as to his or her motives and personality, but we are not given any information as to how this character fits into the film's broader plot. Repeatedly, Zahler brings a new figure into the movie but without establishing that character's role in the narrative as a whole. Gradually, however, we see how the different characters interact within the scope of the film's narrative arc. An exemplary figure is a young woman whom we meet at the mid-point of the movie -- the woman is a new mother and doesn't want to leave her baby in her apartment with her stay-at-home partner and the child's father. There is a lengthy sequence in which the young mother hesitates to go to work, refuses to get on the bus to the Bank where she is employed, and has a long dialogue scene with the baby's father in which he persuades her to board the bus and go to her job. (Unfortunately, the Bank where she works will be robbed in the next fifteen minutes and the young woman ends up shot to pieces on the bank's floor.) The film is very long, about two hours and thirty minutes although it's plot is pretty spare and rather abstract -- there are not a lot of incidents in the film; rather, sequences are drawn out to what seems inordinate length although the dialogue is so sharp and bizarre and the scenes so well-imagined that the picture never becomes tedious. The narrative strategy is clearly inefficient, intentionally so, and complicates our perception of the characters -- and this increases the film's length.
An ex-con struggles to establish himself on the outsidew. His mother is working as a hooker and this threatens the ex-con's little brother, who, in the manner of gangster films in the thirties, is crippled. Two thuggish cops played by Gibson and Vaughn stake-out a Hispanic drug dealer. They arrest the man, slamming him down on an exterior walkway at his apartment and pinning him to the ground with a boot on the man's skull and the back of his neck. A neighbor films the bust on a cell-phone and both cops are called on the carpet by the Commissioner, played by Don Johnson. (These scenes are wince-inducing, particularly in light of the right-wing dialogue surrounding them. But, it must be remembered that the movie was made two years before the George Floyd incident which the picture seems to presage.) The cops are put on a six-week suspension without pay for police brutality. (Where is the Federation of Law Enforcement Union?) The scene with Commissioner Calvert is the part of the film that has garnered the most post-racial reckoning criticism -- it's got some stagey dialogue about the liberal media and the cowardly politicians and judges. This suspension without pay triggers the heist plot. Left to their own devices, Gibson's character -- he's called Brett Ridgman -- and his partner, Tony Lurasetti (Vaughn), plan to rob some robbers who are plotting a bank heist. Ridgman needs the money because his teenage daughter is being bullied by some Black thugs and the cop fears that she will be raped. He tells his wife he's going to find some money so they can move out of their increasingly dangerous neighborhood. (His wife, like the ex-con's little brother, is conspicuously disabled -- she's a tough ex-cop with multiple sclerosis.) Tony needs some quick cash so he can persuade his girlfriend to marry him -- she's a little suspicious, justly so, about his illiberal tendencies as a cop; that is, as the script informs us a tendency to employ "cast iron" methods in policing the streets. (We've seen Tony with Ridgman behave with appalling violence in arresting the Hispanic drug dealer and mercilessly rousting his half-naked deaf girlfriend -- Tony says he can't understand her quite articulate speech because it sounds "like a dolphin or something.") It turns out some very cruel and murderous criminals, clad head to to toe in black with gas masks and goggles, are on a crime spree murdering people prolifically throughout the city named Bulwark in this movie. (I think it's actually Vancouver.) The bad guys use a security van to raid a Bank, killing everyone there. Ridgman won't call in the bank robbery because he wants to rob the robbers. The rogue cops chase the bad guys to a remote location amidst an urban wasteland of some sort -- it's desert with abandoned warehouses, dead rats, refrigerators in ditches, and, at the end of the bad road, an antique service station decaying in the dark desolation. There follows an extremely violent and protracted siege in which the rogue cops attack the villains and vice-versa -- this siege lasts about a quarter of the movie and is extremely well-choreographed and plausible. This battle pits the cops against about six villains who have taken a hostage -- there are also two getaway drivers who were not involved in the murders in the Bank. (They are supposed to be sympathetic and include the ex-con with the crippled brother whom we saw in the first scenes in the movie.) Further description would involve serious spoilers -- there is one shocking act of violence in the film's brutal climax that is completely unexpected and disturbing. Ultimately, almost all of the principals are killed and, on that note, the movie ends.
The movie is very peculiar. It has strange "soul" songs, all apparently written by Zahler, the director, and they are either terrible or great, I suppose, depending on your perspective (I thought the music was uniquely awful). Most notably, the film's dialogue is composed in pseudo-Shakespearian verse -- everyone speaks like they are in Shakespeare adaptation of a Mickey Spillane novel. Sleeping is said to "processing air." Something is "bad like lasagna in a can." Getting killed is "being punctuated". The bad guys intone this motto: "Do not prioritize money over having a heartbeat." There are innumerable examples of this sort of diction in the film -- and, again, you will either enjoy the Elizabethan turns of phrase or despise them as pretentious idiocy. (I liked the dialogue.) This sort of fruity overripe way of talking reaches a climax in the scene where the young mother returns to the Bank workplace after her three month maternity leave -- the great Fred Melamed plays the Bank's director and he speaks with majestic turns of phrase that resemble a Jewish John Gielgud. (It's tiny part, Melamed gets killed about two minutes after his impressive appearance, but represents Zahler's overwrought diction at its most outrageous.) I recognize the influence -- Zahler is trying to stylize his dialogue like words spoken hardboiled fiction by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and it plays like Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep speaking like Macbeth. The movie is brilliantly acted -- Mel Gibson is particularly good as the sixty year old cop who recognizes that his life is a failure and, so, tempted to end his career with one big score. (The supposition that cops are poor is ridiculous; every cop I've ever known is very prosperous, supplementing their basic salary with vast amounts of time-and-a-half overtime and well-compensated moonlighting work as security at concerts, bouncing at bars, and so on.) Zahler is very gifted with respect to staging violence -- the siege of the armored car is a kind of masterpiece, impeccably designed and topographically and relentlessly logical as well as horrifying. The film is unafraid to use very long takes, sometimes two or three minutes, and there are only a few close-ups; action is mostly filmed in the middle distance. My chief reservation about the film is its inordinate length -- the plot would be worth about 80 minutes in a fifties' film noir but this picture is twice that length. Stake-outs and car chases are drawn out to Wagnerian proportions -- mostly it seems to make time for Zahler's exorbitant and showy dialogue. I liked the movie and recommend it with reservations -- it's great but very long and sordid. The movie features a cameo by the wonderful Udo Kier, who, of course, plays a degenerate; I always like to see the ineffably rancid Udo Kier strut his stuff in movies.
No comments:
Post a Comment