What better way to inaugurate the 2929 Productions blog than to link to a
glowing review of WE OWN THE NIGHT from our friends across the pond at
Le Monde (France's equivalent of
The New York Times). For the non-francophone readers, below is a translation:
WE OWN THE NIGHT: A lawless and fatherless world
What a great title and what a great film! The former is taken from the NYPD slogan, the latter is one of the great triumphs of this year's Cannes competition. After LITTLE ODESSA (1994) and THE YARDS (2000), James Gray, who makes films only rarely, has made with his third film a dazzling new work in the cop genre.
We'll recognize the principal obsessions of the film: fractured brotherhood, the impossibility of true vengeance, the conflict between the law of the family and the law of the urban landscape. In this way, James Gray's work revitalizes the profound affinities between film noir and Greek tragedy, and in the process (under the conflicting auspices of the American Dream, the Russian Mafia, and the Jewish destiny), deals subtly with the problem of the search for identity.
"We Own the Night" brings back the universe of 1980s New York. That's where Bobby (Joaquin Phoenix) manages, in the company of of his girlfriend Amada (Eva Mendes, the ideal synthesis of grace and feminine sex appeal), a prosperous nightclub, for the head of a Russian family. Everything would go well if two irredeemably opposed forces didn't cross their weapons--under the sign of familial blood and fatalism--against Bobby's nirvana of hedonism and cocaine.
In the New York of that era, these two forces are represented by a police force with declining prestige and a Russian mafia that is less hemmed in and more aggressive. It's on Bobby's territory, not to mention by his very own flesh and blood, that these two forces will meet, in the form of a familial conflict.
You see, Bobby is, on one side, the actual son and the brother of two figures of the crime unit, Burt (Robert Duvall) and Joseph (Mark Wahlberg) Grusinsky, but on the other side, he's the adoptive son of his employer, the peaceful Russian patriarch, and a kind of hostage to the latter's nephew, Vadim, a pitiless drug trafficker.
MORAL GANGRENE
The plot of "We Own the Night," which we'll keep ourselves from saying a single more word about, is nothing more than the story of the choice that Bobby makes between these two filial obligations: the side that he's embarrassed about and has kept a secret to better free himself from the shackles of his integrity; and the side that opens the doors to the American Dream, which itself is starting to change, under the light of the disco ball and with easy drugs and easy money, into a nightmare of moral gangrene.
Having renounced his European heritage to become Robert Green, Bobby and his name represent this dilemma and the film uses him to pose the question of Kind in which Bobby, though aware of this European heritage, is inscribed at the same time by his American identity--juggling his kinships with both the Old and New Worlds.
This moral imperative that James Gray is outlining and the political incorrectness of the response to that moral imperative, are remarkable--even though they elicited some hooting in the screening. This imperative and its response suggest to us that a world without father and without law wouldn't be livable, that there's no new foundation that would allows us to assume its yoke and pay its price. Further, they tell us that fidelity to the family wouldn't even be able to oppose loyalty to the urban landscape in a world without faith and without law--and that the model of "We Own the Night" is closer to Abraham Polonsky's "Force of Evil" (1948), with its Biblical references that entangle two brothers on opposite sides of the law, than to Coppola's "Godfather."
From the actors' dazzling performances to the way that both spirit and flesh are dramatized, from the ideas and to the action, this film--in which the final word, sanctioning the inauguration ritual of the NYPD, is "amen"-- reminds us that James Gray is one of the greatest American directors of our time.
