BARELY LIT FURNACE
Despite emotional sludge, manly cast shines
Bleeding the biblical artery of brotherly love with all the smalltown gravitas of a Bruce Springsteen song, director Scott Cooper creates another manly stink with his new film, Out of the Furnace.
The actor turned writer-director scored a huge hit with his late Oscar-race entry Crazy Heart a few years back, and he clearly saved some of the bacterial culture from Jeff Bridges’s cowboy boots for this new movie starring Casey Affleck and Christian Bale as steel-town siblings.
A true bromance forged from the blueeyed steel of the once dominant white male, Out of the Furnace is set against the bruised skies of Pittsburgh, the symbolic foundry where the American dream was hammered and tonged into existence.
It’s here, in a small suburban house overlooking three rivers that Baze brothers Rodney (Affleck) and Russell (Bale) grew up with their steelworker dad. They didn’t have a lot, but the boys had honour and a name, and for Russell, being an honest man making an honest wage was always enough.
Rodney, however, always dreamt of more — and that’s why this forcefully moody movie feels a little overcooked from the start.
Urging us to wrap our lips around the barrel of the Baze family shotgun for the duration, Cooper lays out the obvious path to tragedy: Rodney has gambling debts and a self-destructive streak that followed him home after serving several tours in the Middle East.
His elder, responsible brother wants to help him by paying off the balance owing. But we all know once you’re in deep with the Mob, you’ve made yourself an easy chair out of cement.
If that weren’t bad enough, the mobster who owns the IOU is a twisted piece of razor wire named Harlan DeGroat ( Woody Harrelson), a junkie and a psychopath who enjoys hurting people and debasing women.
Cooper opens the whole drama with a scene showing Harrelson at a drive-in movie with an unfortunate female companion. A stranger intervenes after he gives the lady a whack, and that’s when we see DeGroat’s predatory nature kick in — reducing the other guy to a bloody pulp without apology.
The violence of this sequence certainly prepares us for the bloodbath that follows, but Cooper isn’t content with a plain, ordinary payback story packed with vengeance and mano-a-mano encounters.
He wants us to feel and think. He wants to show us a family of strong, proud American men who have been thrown onto the slag heap of the modern economy without mercy, or even a thank-you.
The frail form of U.S. pride — embodied by the Baze patriarch — is dying on the couch after working his whole life at the local steel mill. Loyal and responsible Russell is at his side, eager to make his final breath meaningful, but in a bid to help Rodney, Russell ends up in prison.
This is the first of several hairpin turns Cooper takes, and like all the others that follow, it feels slightly gratuitous and more than a little soapy. It’s as if Cooper fell asleep reading everything Arthur Miller ever wrote and decided he could capture the same haunted quality of the Loman clan with little more than ham-fisted symbolism and an empathetic hero.
It never works any realistic magic — despite rusty cars and Willem Dafoe’s polyester suits — but Out of the Furnace is still hugely entertaining thanks to the cast, who tame their dramatically over-coiffed characters with Brylcreem, a professional comb and a Ron Burgundy wink at the mirror.
The screaming standout is Harrelson, who leverages his hairlessness, crooked nose and ice-blue eyes into one of the eeriest villains since Dennis Hopper’s mask-huffing sex of- fender in Blue Velvet.
As the misogynist, junkie thug, Harrelson creates a cockroach of a character that appears indestructible. So when the plot twists into a pretzel and throws Harrelson’s piranha into the tank with Afflecks’s wounded soldier, we know there’s going to be blood and a few body parts floating through the final frames.
We are not disappointed. The movie chugs toward its destination with quiet resolve. Yet, for all the grand ambition to tell a modern story of two brothers steeped in ancient male codes, Out of the Furnace skids out on the oily streets of melodrama.
Even with Sam Shepard’s stoic presence and Christian Bale’s grounded confidence, Cooper’s film feels forced. Not even Forest Whitaker is capable of delivering a moment of unglazed sentimentality in this saccharine retelling of Cain and Abel that features quiet bonding over muscle cars.
Harrelson is the acid bath that cuts through all the slop and brings fresh edges to cliché, and with Bale as his heroic foil, Out of the Furnace finds just enough torque to keep it out of the emotional mud. But it still spins its wheels every time it revs the dramatic engine.