Out of the Furnace review

               The characters in Scott Cooper’s “Out of the Furnace” have everything working against them. They’re under paid, they’re incarcerated, they’re deep in debt, they have cancer, and worst of all, they are they are living in the genre confines of a bleak rural noir. Like 2010’s “Winters Bone” or even this year’s “Prisoners”, crime and revenge has bled from the urban streets into the red-neck hills, where the consequences of human betrayal are met with even more brutality.

                Cooper’s follow up to his country music character-study “Crazy Heart” is quite a departure in style.  Even though the understated quietness of his scenery and the subtle direction of his actors are still intact, this movie moves away from the tangible warmth of the county-western bars and plunges deep into a dower underworld of drugs and murder. While Cooper philosophizes on America’s post Iraq psychology and the economic weight burdened on blue-collar culture, when the plot finally kicks into gear , his film settles confidently into its base interests as a nail-biting, pulp thriller--and an occasionally brassy one at that.

                Christian Bale and Casey Affleck play Russell and Rodney Baze, two brothers who live  in a rust-belt, steel town, and who each have their own crosses to bare. Russell is sent to prison for 5 years after a drunk driving accident and Rodney is sent to war in Iraq, where he hopes to make some money for the family. When Russell is finally set free, he finds his girl (Zoe Saldana) remarried and his brother is forced to lose bare-knuckle boxing matches to pay off his ever growing debt with a local drug syndicate. After Rodney goes missing and the cops are tied-up by jurisdiction to move forward with the case, Russell decides to investigate the rotted underbelly of this dangerous world himself.

                 “Out of the Furnace” isn’t nearly as profound or as A-level as it thinks it is, but the sincerity of the performances and a seat clenching third-act saves it from being an unrelenting downer.  Bale and lil’ Affleck are both effective without overplaying things and their instincts are tuned well enough know which note to play each scene.  Side performances from Willem Dafoe, Sam Shepard and the recently revived Forest Whitaker fill out their roles nicely as well. But it is Woody Harrelson as the tobacco stained, meth-head, hillbilly heavy, who drips with intimidating menace in every scene he steals.

                While spending the first half of the film stacking conflict on top of complication against the protagonists, the story feels a bit loose and shaggy, and slow to get going. But when the pawns have been put into place the despair truck is finally done unloading, all of this character work pays off in an old fashion man-hunt.  The violence is treated just a blunt as the emotions are approached with tenderness and the mechanics of the cat and mouse set-piece’s between Bale and Harrelson and genuinely exciting and unpredictable. 

                If you can wade through the woe-is-me grunge in all of it, there’s a half-way decent revenge movie to enjoy in here. I can’t say Cooper gives us anything we haven’t seen somewhere else done better—“No County For Old Men” and the Aussie gangster film  “Animal Kingdom” comes to mind—but sometimes when you get a respectable director and talented cast together you can end up with something pretty watchable.

Grade: B -

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2013