We Own The Night

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched We Own the Night a picture written and directed by James Gray.

The story is set in New York in 1988. Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix) is on top of the world, the manager of a glamorous nightclub with a gorgeous girlfriend (Eva Mendez) who loves him intensely. Bobby also has the great trust and love of the club’s owner, a Russian immigrant who makes most of his money importing furs and who treats Bobby like a son.

But Bobby has another family, and he takes his girlfriend to meet them on the occasion of his brother’s promotion to captain of the police force. These are the Gruzinskys, and Bobby is so alienated from his brother Joe (Mark Wahlberg) and father, Chief Al (Robert Duvall) that he has taken his mother’s name of Green and keeps it a shameful secret that he has cops in his family. Joe and the Chief take Bobby apart from the celebration and tell him they are hot on the trail of a Russian drug dealer and importer, Vadim Nijinsky. Vadim is using Bobby’s club as his dealing HQ, and Joe is about to come down hard on him. Bobby can’t believe it. And he won’t help them, which wins him the contempt of brother and father.

Bobby carries on with his wild, fun, partying, wealthy life with girlfriend and best pal Jumbo. But one night the cops bust into the club, led by Joe. They shake down everybody, grab a couple of Vadim’s lieutenants, and really give Bobby the business. The result is Bobby is in the tank overnight, and Joe gets shot in the head outside his home.

Bobby, in spite of his arguments and heated words with Joe, takes the news hard. Even worse is that his father and other top cops believe Bobby himself had a hand in ordering Joe’s attack. Joe is alive, luckily, but is in critical condition – it will be 4 months before he can get out of the hospital and return to work.

Meanwhile Bobby is approached by Vadim himself. Vadim is the club owner’s ‘crazy nephew’ and there are rumors that Vadim only gets to operate out of the club because he has his uncle’s blessing. But the chief and other cops have checked out the owner for months, and have found no evidence that he’s involved in anything illegal. Just a nice old guy who loves his grandchildren and may not even know the full extent of Vadim’s dealing. Now Vadim admits to Bobby that he is a big-time dealer, and will have a huge shipment coming in soon. He trusts Bobby because his uncle loves him, and he offers Bobby a chance to help distribute the drugs. Bobby asks if it isn’t dangerous now that the cops have busted the club, but Vadim is unconcerned: he dismisses the cops and says he put the hit on Joe, and has a contract out on Chief Al and some others there.

Bobby ‘Green’ goes straight to his old man and tells him all of this. The chief doesn’t have a real plan. So Bobby proposes to take Vadim up on his offer and lead the cops to Vadim’s stash house.

Bobby is taken by the Russians to the house, but he gives himself away. The cops are only just in time to save his life, and they manage to capture Vadim, but Vadim learns who Bobby really is now, and vows revenge. Bobby is put with his girlfriend under witness protection, a miserable life of motels and hotels and hiding out, watched over all the time by cop bodyguards.

Vadim later escapes. Bobby watches his father shot and killed in a car accompanying Bobby to a new hideout. Bobby decides to join the cops to fight Vadim and avenge his dad. But his girlfriend can’t stand the life and leaves him. Then Bobby finds out that his best friend Jumbo gave away the secret of where Bobby was, and the person he told was – the old Russian furrier. The man who was like a father to Bobby.

They lay siege to the old man when he tries to unload the big shipment of drugs. Vadim escapes and Bobby tracks him into a bank of river reeds. Bobby shoots and kills Vadim, but feels no great release or satisfaction in it. Bobby has lost every part of his old life.

The final scene shows the graduation ceremony of the Police Academy where Bobby is the salutatorian. For a moment Bobby thinks he sees his girlfriend in the audience but it isn’t her. He is left with his brother and a cop’s life.

There are a few things I find interesting in this one. On the whole I found it well-mounted and shot; the car chase in the rain was an excellent scene, concentrating on Bobby in his car, only cutting outside for brief shots when it was needed to make sense of the action. The acting is quite good, and yet I didn’t believe the ending. And I was left unsatisfied.

James Gray on the commentary says that he looked on the story as one of destiny, of fate. Of course the audience will know from the third scene that Bobby will end up in uniform, and so Gray isn’t interested in what will happen so much as how it will happen. He wasn’t at all expecting the audience not to believe that Bobby would join the cops – the way I didn’t. I fully expected Bobby to use his temporary status with the force only to avenge his father on Vadim and maybe the old furrier as well, then (like Will Kane in High Noon and Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry) throw down his badge and walk away. So Gray is constructing his screenplay with a major misapprehension when it comes to viewers like me.

He also says that he didn’t want to make a ‘rah, rah, go cops’ kind of movie, but to follow in the track of 1970s movies which end on a mixed note. But I was struck by how closely Bobby Green’s story follows Michael Corleone’s in the original The Godfather – both stories have a son who leaves the family business, but who is drawn back in when his father is threatened, and who ends up a better and more ruthless exemplar than his formerly-respected brother. The idea that the cops are like the mob put me into thinking Bobby’s end was almost entirely negative; combine this with my disbelief that Bobby would even want to be a cop, and it seems like a total loss. Gray did too good a job portraying the glamor and appeal of the nightclub manager’s life; who in the audience would think he ended up better off as a lowly rookie cop in the cold, dirty, police precincts after lording over a huge nightclub as its king with a super-hot princess at his side?

The third point that interested me concerns my reactions to Joaquin Phoenix as Bobby. Bobby has to draw me through the story. It isn’t enough that the character be well-drawn or well-acted. It isn’t enough that he be believable (he wasn’t believable for me, anyhow). But he also has to be likable. I have to like Bobby and want to identify with him, to empathize with him, to root for him. If Gray can manage to get me to do this, then he can count on Bobby pulling me through the story even if I don’t entirely believe it.

Now, there are two ways to get us to like a character.

1. Likability can be built into the script, or
2. The character can be played by an inherently likable actor.

Way No 1 needs scenes, lines, actions. It’s easy enough to pull off, but it takes valuable screen time in something that is like exposition but not quite. There are two things that happen in the First Act of a movie:

1. We learn how the predicament is built. This happens inside the story.
2. We learn how we are supposed to respond to the movie. This happens between us and the movie: are we supposed to laugh or cry? Does it engage our feelings or our intellect? Are we supposed to like what happens, or get good and mad at it? What genre of movie is it we’re watching, anyhow?

Adding scenes and lines and bits of business to manage our feelings toward the hero is part of the second item there. They can and should be interwoven with other actions and scenes, but no matter what, they do take up running time, and there’s a shortcut to doing it, that involves casting.

Cast Kirk Douglas in the role, we will expect one kind of movie, and respond, and expect to respond, in one way. Cast Jim Carrey, or Lee Marvin, or Joaquin Phoenix, or Charlie Chaplin, and we will expect something else.

Gray doesn’t do anything to make us like Bobby Green, other than to portray him as living a life we would all enjoy (but this implies that we will feel unhappy when he loses this life, and we won’t like it when he becomes a mere cop). This means the movie depends almost entirely on Joaquin Phoenix to make us like Bobby enough to carry us through the changes in his life.

This ‘likability’ is a mysterious, undefinable, unmeasurable thing. In television, they just call it Q instead of anything tangible. It’s the rarest thing. It isn’t just charisma, though charisma helps. It isn’t just sex appeal, although that helps too. It isn’t strength of character or anything racial or generic.

And Joaquin Phoenix doesn’t have it – for me, anyway. Which makes me wonder how I would have reacted to the same movie if a more likable actor starred in it.

(30 April 2009)