TROPIC SPROCKETS

A Walk Among the Tombstones
BY IAN BROCKWAY

Konk Life Staff Writer

Liam Neeson has done so many revenge pictures ala Nicolas Cage that he is easy to spoof. He has such an easily recognizable expression: The tired eyes as if filled with cake batter, the knitted brows, the pale granite face that looks like a headstone. His many characters possess an identical body, shambling with jagged lament.

In “A Walk Among the Tombstones” from a novel by Lawrence Block and directed by Scott Frank (The Lookout) there are some of those elements, in force, but the apprehension is so tightly wound with such shifty and rancid characters, that it all manages to work. Neeson plays Detective Matthew Scudder, a man who is battling demons, mainly alcohol.

He is haunted by the moment when he went into a bar during a brutal shooting and stopped the assailant only to have the bullet ricochet and kill a young girl. Scudder promptly joined AA. Now, as a semi-retired investigator, he is a shadowy man who works for gifts, but only, it seems, if he likes you.

A young man Kenny Kristo (Dan Stevens) contacts the lugubrious investigator saying two men killed his wife after they received ransom money. Scudder is reluctant to help, since it becomes evident that Kristo is a drug dealer but given the sadistic nature of the crime, Scudder agrees to find out all he can. The apprehension is in the reality that every character is as shady as the next, with some anxious cinematography that recalls “Serpico” and the work of William Friedkin in its harsh lighting along dark streets.

There is a gloomy and nonchalant Jonas: A big jelly of a man (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) who is alternately criminal and self deprecating. But above all, the film has quite possibly two of the most sinister characters that have ever been seen since “The Silence of the Lambs.”

The scariest moment may be one that doesn’t show anything Halloween-worthy at all, merely a shot of these two men at the breakfast table in their underwear reading the morning paper. In the role of TJ, singer Brian “Astro” Bradley (The X Factor) is excellent as a young homeless kid who worships Scudder. TJ’s idolatry mimics a bit of Joey Starrett in “Shane”.

Scudder’s identification with AA is a nice touch as well with the “twelve steps” becoming a personal metaphor for the detective in his attempt to make things right. And there is mystery as to why Scudder wants to help in the first place. As an anti-hero as gray as the dirt path he walks through, Scudder takes on loads of guilt and pain as a fatalistic matter of course. His speech to TJ about guns and self esteem is as somber and sincere as it gets, unusual for a conventional good guy/bad guy yarn. The lines become blurred by sadness.

“A Walk Among the Tombstones” never stoops to be self-conscious. It is a gritty hide and seek with a gun and does so much with so little. A simple trip down the stairs becomes an invitation to an almost paranormal sense of evil. But, best of all, the dry-bone delivery of Liam Neeson, which is usually easy fodder for a joke, has never been more appealing.

 

The Two Faces of January

The existential yet exuberant novel “The Two Faces of January” by Patricia Highsmith is now a film by Iranian director Hossein Amini (screenwriter, The Wings of the Dove).

The narrative which is set in Greece, concerns a poetic but obsessive drifter Rydal and his compulsion with a bourgeoisie stock scammer named Chester, who looks like Rydal’s recently deceased dad. In the book, Rydal is entranced by Chester’s wife Colette, too, who also happens to have a striking resemblance to Rydal’s cousin Agnes, who was romantically involved with him. Rydal is played by the intense Oscar Isaac, and Chester is inhabited by a teeth-grinding Viggo Mortensen.

While the film adaptation tones down the outlandish desperation of Chester and doesn’t mention the Colette / Agnes comparisons together with Rydal’s guilt regarding the bad romance, it succeeds as an acidic noir idyll with the flavor of “Strangers on a Train” (another Highsmith book and a Hitchcock classic).

Mortensen is well outfitted as the shifty and tense man who is constantly looking out for the police as he goes from one tourist attraction to the next. He is an appropriate white linen shark. As Chester goes to his ritzy hotel in Athens, after a day of sightseeing, he is startled, interrupted in his boozy foreplay by an insistent knock. A detective waits patiently.

Chester tries to stall him but the investigator doesn’t fall for small talk and aims his gun. With deliberate force, Chester kicks the man to the floor and knocks his head into the hard tile. Chester drags the body out to the hall, but he can’t hold the man and loses his grip. Rydal appears. Chester asks for help, insisting the man is drunk and Rydal readily consents. Chester quickly asks Rydal to stay with him and a bland Colette (Kirsten Dunst), to act as an interpreter.

Chester becomes edgy though feeling that the young pensive man with the dark eyes will turn him in and leave with his wife. In the role, Mortensen is satisfactorily petty and selfish, although some of the nouveau riche behaviors of the original Chester character are omitted. Oscar Isaac’s Rydal is more dishonest and calculating and less spontaneous in this film adaptation.

At the start, we see Rydal shortchanging a gullible girl. Despite these differences from the novel, the film capably weaves some co-dependent tension with Chester and Rydal oscillating between a kind of understanding and a volatile hatred for one another.

This pairing is similar to the previous mentioned Hitchcock work with the effete but psychotic Bruno (Robert Walker becoming drawn to the young, dashing tennis star, Guy (Farley Granger)). The best scenes here are the ones in which Viggo Mortensen tries to ignore his sociopathic acts and become a kind of smarmy counselor to Rydal as the young man stares with a steely concentration, alternately seeming dead and wistful in the manner of a David Cronenberg film.

The locations are fittingly midnight blue and sweeping, crisply brilliant and as ominously dim as one might expect from a Highsmith thriller. Every character is attired well, displaying many a fedora hat and suit as linear as a Parthenon column.

Although the film dispenses with most of the book’s darkly comic overtones, “The Two Faces of January” is another handsome addition to the films made from Patricia Highsmith’s novels. By the second half especially, the passive aggressive noose tightens, and the young Rydal realizes that he is attracted to this wincing, self absorbed man (out of habit and guilt) just as much as he is repelled by him.

Write Ian at [email protected]

[livemarket market_name="KONK Life LiveMarket" limit=3 category=“” show_signup=0 show_more=0]