Texarkana Gazette

‘Out of the Furnace’ rusts over

- By Jake Coyle

“Out of the Furnace” is an earnestly crafted, passionate­ly acted working-class drama rusted over by its noble intentions of steel-town sympathizi­ng.

Director Scott Cooper sets his movie in Braddock, Pa., where he also shot it. The town mill hovers as the empty heart of a corroded city.

Cooper lays the atmosphere on thick, suffocatin­g the film with worn interiors, factory smokestack­s, dive bars and highway overpasses. It’s filled with tattoos, beer bottles, muscle cars, flannel shirts and, to top it off, Eddie Vedder (who opens the films with the song “Release”).

The film’s clichés are many, but few will doubt its weighty sincerity, its heavy-handed Rust Belt eulogizing.

What’s dying? The lives of blue-collar men. The film is centered on the Baze brothers, Russell (Christian Bale) and Rodney (Casey Affleck), both of whom are finding that, as their father dies of lung cancer from years at the mill, life in Braddock is dried up.

Russell is an honest mill worker and Rodney is an increasing­ly lost Army man, altered badly from repeated tours in Iraq.

They’re two of the men in this very macho ensemble that also includes Woody Harrelson, Sam Shepard, Willem Dafoe and Forrest Whitaker. One of the pleasures of “Out of the Furnace” is to be in the company of such a fine group of faces, all of them various shades of weariness and anger.

No, “Out of the Furnace” is serious business, announced from the first scene at a drivein: a brutal, largely unprompted beat down given by Harrelson’s Harlan DeGroat, who we later learn is a menacing Appalachia­n meth-dealer and underworld figure. He’s the fire the film’s title promises, into which the Baze brothers will jump from the furnace of Braddock.

Their route to him begins when Rodney runs up a debt to a local bookie (Dafoe). After stopping by to secretly help pay it down (and have a drink pushed on him), Russell rams a car and is imprisoned for DUI. When he later gets out, things have worsened: Their father has died, his girlfriend (Zoe Saldana, the film’s lone woman) has left him for a cop (Whitaker), and Rodney is now earning money in bare-knuckle fights.

Affleck is excellent as Rodney, a tense, confused shell of rage. He wants punishment, and he finds it when he pushes to land a bout in DeGroat’s ring.

Cooper’s drive to tell a story of Rust Belt decay has clearly elicited dedication in his cast.

But it has also given the film such heavy-handedness that “Out of the Furnace” loses much of the authentici­ty it strives so hard for.

“Out of the Furnace,” a Relativity Media release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Associatio­n of America for “intense sequences of violence and action, some frightenin­g images, thematic elements, a suggestive situation and language.” Running time: 116 minutes. Two stars out of four.

 ??  ?? Casey Affleck in a scene from “Out of the Furnace.”
Casey Affleck in a scene from “Out of the Furnace.”

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