Scott Cooper's latest film,
Out of the Furnace, his follow-up to his melancholic Academy Award winning country western themed debut
Crazy Heart traipses through the drudges of contemporary working class miserablism, whilst trying to affirm itself into something of myth. Reminiscent, if only at face value to
The Place Beyond the Pines, Derek Cianfrance's gritty springtime-released indie which starred Ryan Gosling, this is another doomed tale of the unlucky who succumb to circumstance with ambitions to harken back to the filmmaking standards prevalent in 1970s American movies while infusing them with a 'now' sense of topicality. It's an ambition that's well-intentioned and in its most stirring sequences, beautifully filmed, but there's a difference between homage and interpretation.
Out of the Furnace visually and stylistically recalls Vietnam-era classics like
The Deer Hunter and
Coming Home, yet the effort is strained because the characters are generic cinematic tropes of the most hopeless kind. And however dressed up with a METHOD (the caps are important) preparedness by an ensemble of great actors, the film never manages to come close to bringing it close to the human heart, soul or mind.
The gritty morality tale takes place in Braddock, Pennsylvania, on which it was also filmmed, one of the millions of small American towns where life is hard, and living in it is harder. Disfranchised and full of the type of working class strife that typically only gets depicted on film in depressing movies that Irish filmmaker Ken Loach likes to make, yet Cooper adeptly establishes a sense of place and time, at least initially, of contemporary men and their struggles in the economically depressed Rust Belt. A steel mill kind of town, a place where Russell Baze (Christian Bale) works and likely assumes he will expire, not unlike his cancer-ridden father who worked their before him and so forth and so forth. Sam Shepard pops in as his salt of the earth uncle to ruminate of the better, less scummy times.
