ZOE SALDANA AND CHRISTIAN BALE IN OUT OF THE FURNACE

Vengeance with a bitter taste

Christian Bale is back in working class America in Scott Cooper's Out of the Furnace as Russell Baze, a straight-arrow steel worker with hard luck who takes the law into his own hands to avenge the wrongful death of his Iraq War vet younger brother Rodney (Casey Affleck). The gray, struggling world of Out of the Furnace, its dead-end Pennsylvania town, handsomely desolate spaces, decrepit houses, brutal struggles, nasty bad guys, bad mistakes, and relentless machismo, evokes pieces of perhaps too many other movies.

And yet somehow it's class all the way. This, like Cooper's directing debut Crazy Heart but without a central performance as brilliant as Jeff Bridges' Oscar winner, is a feast of acting. It's hard not to like watching Bale and Affleck with Sam Shepard as their uncle and with Willem Dafoe, Woody Harrelson, and Forest Whitaker on the side. As a chaser there is Zoe Saldana playing Lena, Russell's girlfriend stolen away from him by Chief Wesley Barnes, the local cop (Whitaker), while Russell is in jail for DUI manslaughter. Zoe seems a bit wasted, given that she has previously embodied Neytiri in Avatar and Cataleya, the superheroine of Olivier Megaton's delightfully over-the-top Colombiana. She's just a girl here, looking sad and apologetic.

Willem Dafoe and Woody Harrelson play dubious characters running illegal bare knuckle boxing matches like those in Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone. Rodney gets involved in them after four tours in Iraq. He can't face a normal job, and that of course includes where Russell is happy to work -- the steel mill, which, of course, is going to be closed down because it's cheaper to get steel from China.

Affleck is buffed-up and indied-down, which is to say this is a less fey and arty role. He's dangerous in those fights, to himself and others. He's supposed to take the fall for his fight boss John Petty (Dafoe), but he keeps getting wild and forgetting. Affleck is fighting over his weight in more ways than one, but nonetheless his performance shows restraint and conviction, and being a total misfit, which seems to come easiest, is part of his character.

Out of the Furnace takes a while to get going, but once it does, it has an intense pace. You get trouble and danger around the corner of every scene. There is a certain balance struck between the two final adversaries. Harlan DeGroat (Harrelson), whose violent, provocative, antisocial behavior is displayed in a scene that introduces the film, not only runs a bigger-stake bare knuckle boxing operation than John Petty's up in New Jersey, but also a high grade crystal meth business. It may be New Jersey, but the trailer trash hillbillies hiding away in the woods making meth, dominated by vicious hatred of outsiders and a rigid code of omertà, are reminiscent of the more subtly portrayed Ozarks of Debra Granik's Winter's Bone.

Here the locals seem too urban, too Central Casting. Likewise Harrellson seems to be delivering one of his standard-issue aggressive crazies, only ramped up so many notches as to seem like parody. The revenge story this develops into is standard issue too, as is its final chase sequence. But still, it's not like that chase's payoff doesn't have its own harsh physicality. And when Russell and Uncle Red (Shepard) go into the woods looking for DeGroat on the pretense of seeking a bag of meth, the danger feels real. This is the sequence that will be remembered -- and the beatings Rodney takes, And, above all, the balance Christian Bale manages to strike here, not for the first time, between slightly sleazy and irresistibly handsome. Bale wears his good looks and his hard-luck role with equal ease. The camera is often caught just looking at him, his soulful eyes, chiseled face, the curl of his long hair along his neck, the way he looks from behind. He is so good-looking, and yet he plays these character roles so well -- much like the new Matthew McConaughey. It will be interesting to see them together on the screen in David O. Russell's upcoming year's-end Oscar-seeker, American Hustle, which may wind up disappointing like Out of the Furnace, too, but at least will be fun.

Out of the Furnace obviously is meant to be some kind of Oscar contender. Its dark grimness and downbeat story won't endear it to the audience that enjoyed Cooper's Crazy Heart, with its romance and good music. Nonetheless dp Masanobu Takayanagi's widescreen 35mm photography makes everything look very good, without for a minute being too pretty. There's a technical link with Winter's Bone besides the milieu in Dickson Hinchcliffe's atmospheric score, and not even a rock illiterate like me could fail to be grabbed by "Pearl Jam’s 'Release' (in both its original and a newly re-recorded version) [that] bookends the film with Eddie Vedder’s wailing, soulful refrain," as I'm informed by Scott Foundas' Variety review. As further hint that this is a class operation, two of the producers are Ridley Scott and Leonardo DiCaprio. But despite actor-director Cooper's ability to draw mostly restrained, nuanced performances from the cast, his writing this time with co-scriptor Brad Ingelsby lacks originality and focus.

Out of the Furnace, 116 mins, debuted at the AFI Festival in November and opened in the US 6 December 2013.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.