Life after The Wire in Brooklyn's Finest

The good, the bad, the undercover:from left, Ethan Hawke, Don Cheadle and Richard Gere are three cops who choose different paths
10 April 2012

The best American urban cop dramas have a good relationship with the fundamentals of gangster rap. That’s been true, and ignored, for a couple of decades now, at least since the late Dennis Hopper’s best directorial effort, Colors (1988) and the underrated guns-and-crack-cocaine-fest New Jack City (1991). The success of HBO’s The Wire was based on the kind of experience and the kind of lingo inhabited by rappers, and the suspicion — crucial to the old Wild West tradition — that the goodies and the baddies are really cut from the same ragged cloth.

People who have been missing The Wire will feel gratified, on several levels, by Brooklyn’s Finest, not least by the discovery that at least half of the show’s cast have parts in this new film, directed by Antoine Fuqua. The director cut his teeth on music videos, which is nice preparation for the moody, iconographic, rhythmic sway of this film, and he manages here to create something pretty deep and pretty driven in narrative terms, while falling a good bit short of brilliance.

This is the story of a week in the lives of three Brooklyn cops. They work in the NYPD’s notorious 65th Precinct, which covers the Van Dyke housing projects. As with the best short stories, we first meet Sal Procida (Ethan Hawke) when he is already some way into his crisis. In cop terms, he is as bent as a three-bob coin: stealing the money from drug busts, he is trying to get his asthmatic wife and kids into a better apartment.

And now he is willing to kill people to get what he needs. As played by Hawke, Sal is a jangling, amoral fool at the end of his tether. He wants to make one last attempt to climb out of the hole but it doesn’t look promising for him.

The officer played by Richard Gere, Eddie Duggan, is due to retire at the end of the week after 20-odd years in the force. You get the impression Duggan is not only a weak man but a man weakened by weakness, and his whiskey-soaked, hooker-loving ways rise like scum to the top of a wishy-washy career. Then there’s Tango Butler (Don Cheadle), an undercover cop who hungers for promotion. He will get it, but first he has to arrange for the capturing of an old friend and ex-con, played by Wesley Snipes.

The drama doesn’t just move between the three cops, it prowls between them, occasionally pouncing, and the film builds up quite a bit of tension. Duggan’s failure as a cop and a man is sometimes existential and sometimes just pathetic: a rookie to whome he is supposing to be showing the ropes asks to be reassigned.

Meanwhile, Sal becomes suicidally desperate and Tango feels pressed out of shape by this entrapment thing, pushed beyond his limits by a federal agent played with enormous ball-breaking energy in the shape of Ellen Barkin.

I mentioned the western vibe going on here, and it becomes pretty significant as the movie progresses. You just know there’s got to be some High Noon for these three guys, some highly choreographed bloodbath, and it comes, perhaps too inevitably, as they converage on the same block of the housing project. The film heads towards too complete a resolution, but that doesn’t stop it from being exciting and stylish on the way there. I like a bit of style in a cop thriller, and Fuqua’s way with the camera, though fast, is never overwhelming or pushy. The main thing to hope for is character and you get that in abundance: each of these cops is wriggling, you feel, amid real concerns. You totally buy their anger and their lostness, feeling that life has differently cheated each of them as they made their bids for honour.

Ethan Hawke has grown into his talent in a way that becomes more exciting with each picture. He is now in early middle-age, and you still feel he has a hundred places to go, with all the ability to get there. As Sal, he literally sweats angst.

He pours a kind of witless corruption at the viewer and I can’t think of another actor who could have done it with such a personal-seeming flavour. Don Cheadle must be relieved to have a meaningful role after his part as Colonel James "Rhodey" Rhodes in Iron Man 2.

Some of us have grown up with the screen impact of Richard Gere, which, in the last decade or more, often seemed to recede into a kind of smug, peace-loving vanity, as if he were being directed from his inner core by the Dalai Lama. What was good for Gere the person — and Gere the brilliant political activist — wasn’t necessarily good for the actor. But one of the excitements of Brooklyn’s Finest, an element that helps you overcome some puzzling confusions in the film, is the gritty, dirty, believable manner in which Gere plays his part. He is a good-looking man who can no longer surf on his good looks alone: the marks of disappointment are on his face, to say nothing of the grime of experience and many hints of loss. Gere inhabits this, he sells it, and he does so in subtle ways. Often, without saying a great deal, you see the character’s soul, and it’s not, may I tell you, the purified soul that is said to come with healthy living and a million hours on the yoga mat. That’s acting, lords, ladies and gentlemen, and in this film it’s coming atcha to show not only an authentic hip-hop world of pain but a world of police who thought their goodness would last all their lives.

Brooklyn's Finest
Cert: 18

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