Getting the real dope: Blanchett in Veronica Guerin.

Truth and Daring
By Ann Morrow

Veronica Guerin
Directed by Joel Schumacher

Dozens of journalists are killed on the job every year, but what made the 1996 assassination of Veronica Guerin, an investigative reporter for the Sunday Independent in Ireland, as newsworthy as her work is that she did not die in a war zone—at least not an officially declared one. A wife and mother, Guerin was covering the drug war in Dublin. For months, she ignored—or survived—threats to her life in order to expose the carnage of the drug trade, from underage junkie-prostitutes to flagrant money laundering to Ireland’s appallingly outdated drug laws. She meant to effect change, and as this gripping biopic from Joel Schumacher so ably leads up to, she did.

The film opens with Veronica (Cate Blanchett) speeding down a highway, laughing to her mother (Brenda Flicker) over a cell phone about beating a rap in traffic court. It then flashes back through the last two years of Guerin’s life, starting with her first story, on Dublin’s shamefully high number of child ODs. She’s already made the acquaintance of John Traynor (Ciaran Hinds), a vain, mid-level gangster who gives her information because he likes the notoriety of having his name in the paper. He also likes Veronica, and flatters himself that she fancies him, too. Veronica isn’t above using her sex appeal to cajole a source, but what she doesn’t know is that John’s far more dangerous boss, John Gilligan (Gerald McSorley), is out of prison and instigating a turf war. And he cannot be cajoled or intimidated.

The many facets of Dublin’s drug morass are efficiently and excitingly woven together: overworked cops, a public made apathetic by hopelessness and poverty, the impunity of drug dealers who know their fortunes will be safe even if they do a stint in the slammer, and the unchecked ferocity of the violence. Schumacher, a talented (Tigerland) but often crass (Bad Company) director, sublimates his slicker instincts to serve the script, getting right in the face of Dublin’s unprecedented crime wave. A snitch is tortured, and then the thugs who did the torturing are exterminated by a rival gang. The fact that guns and cars are not as plentiful in Ireland as they are in America only adds to the brutality: Young and cocky henchmen use motor scooters to outmaneuver their prey, and their hits are methodically carried out with an eye to maximizing their terrorizing effect. No wonder no one wants to acknowledge what’s going on—except Veronica, who is reckless by nature.

She’s also driven by the zeal of passionate reformer, as well as by her healthy ego, which is stoked by the popularity of her articles. As she gets closer to the major players, she uses the pressure of her by-now famous investigation. Yes, she wants to top herself each week, but she’s also like a hound on the hunt: She simply cannot turn back when she’s so close to nailing the kingpin, even after narrowly escaping an attack at her home. The tension is ratcheted by dexterous cutting; the audience knows more than Veronica does, especially about how powerful and ruthless Gilligan really is. After Traynor reluctantly betrays her, Veronica betrays him, putting herself in even greater danger.

Though the proficiency of Schumacher’s style and Carol Doyle’s story make Veronica Guerin unusually watchable for a film with a social agenda, the heart of the film is Blanchett. With a bare minimum of background, she creates a fully realized, and fully contradictory person, one who is as susceptible to fear and doubt as anyone else, and, tragically, just as capable of making mistakes. Blanchett immerses herself in the role so deeply that she seems to be inhabiting Veronica rather than acting her (notice her jittery denial when she lands in the hospital). This extraordinary level of realism is matched by the mostly Irish cast, especially Hinds, as the mercenary but somewhat reasonable Traynor; and McSorley, as the chilling sicko Gilligan. When Veronica, caught up in her own bravado, miscalculates and confronts Gilligan one on one, his savagery is truly shocking.

The moving final sequence recalls—not inappropriately—Silkwood, but goes further, as befits a national heroine. It’s to the credit of all involved that the impact of Guerin’s work—rather than her death—is the film’s dramatic focus. That impact reverberates long after the closing credits.

Unforgiving

Mystic River
Directed by Clint Eastwood

One of my favorite movies is John Ford’s The Searchers, which I watch over and again, always with a renewed sense of awe and appreciation at what nuances and details the director was able to knead from each scene, from every gesture by all performers. There is a world of back-story simmering beneath the surface of the character’s realities that makes this western far more than a tale about two men’s search for a kidnapped girl. Watching Mystic River, I couldn’t help but feel that its director, Clint Eastwood, has made a conscious paean to Ford, for more than simply adapting Dennis Lehane’s best-selling novel, he enlivens it and brings to the fore the distant rumblings of grief, violence and love that are embedded deep within its tortured characters.

Ostensibly a murder mystery, Mystic River begins with the sudden and senseless homicide of 19-year-old Katie (Emmy Rossum), the beloved daughter of Jimmy Markum (Sean Penn). Investigating the killing are Jimmy’s boyhood friend Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon) and his partner Whitey (Laurence Fishburne). Implicated in the investigation is yet another childhood friend, Danny Boyle (Tim Robbins), a shambling, shell of a man haunted by another tragic crime whose repercussions also linger ominously over Jimmy and Sean.

In a chilling prologue, we see Jimmy (Jason Kelly), Sean (Connor Paolo) and Danny (Cameron Bowen) as children, playing around in their working-class neighborhood. Suddenly, a dark sedan pulls up, out of which appears a man the boys believe to be a policeman. Just as suddenly, they’re gone, having taken Danny with them; in a series of brief, impressionist scenes, we realize that Danny was sexually abused for days before escaping into the woods. Forever trapped as a tortured boy within the body of a man, Danny seems at times confused and canny—a combination that keeps his wife Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden) on a taut emotional wire. Sean and Jimmy also can’t shake their guilt, which comes from having been lucky enough not to have been chosen by the molesters. As Jimmy, speaking as a grief-stricken father, muses, had it been him all those years ago, he never would have had the balls to approach the goddess who was Katie’s mother, a woman who subsequently died while he was serving a 2-year prison term.

As Sean and Whitey conduct their investigation, Jimmy enlists the aid of a motley crew of fellow Southies. Frustrated by the clannish, authority-defying silence that punctuates nearly all his attempts at answers from the neighbors, Whitey is representative of the movie’s broader audience, who might also find the neighborhood’s tribal loyalties and deep-seated codes and prejudices alien. His frustration is somewhat our own—Why don’t these people help?—but Eastwood artfully balances this viewpoint with a measure of sympathy for the natives. Sean’s and Jimmy’s brand of justice are similar in that they seek to stamp out such evil as posed by child molesters and murderers, but Sean works within the system whereas Jimmy works within the far-more-intricate and no-less-dangerous milieu of South Boston.

The performances are mesmerizing, although Penn’s at times veers from raw and provocative to actor realizing he’s got an incredibly meaty bone on which to chew. Bacon is consistently right as a troubled soul whose escape into work has not prevented the loss of his wife or the forced return, by way of Katie’s murder, to the demons that haunt him. Robbins’ is a wily performance, balancing his character’s often-in-vain attempts to shut out his nightmares with a profound sadness and an equally profound intelligence. The scene in which Sean and Whitey interrogate him at police headquarters is masterful, a shocking reminder that Danny is no simpleton.

There are a few moments in Mystic River that have stuck with me, at first because they just didn’t seem right, but as time went on, because they reveal a sort of twist in the plot machinations. Both involve female characters. When Danny comes home, bloodied and stabbed, supposedly from a mugging, on the very night that Katie is murdered, Celeste is by turns suspicious, fearful and, then, empowered. She kisses her bleeding husband—kisses him hard and long, in a way that surprises both Danny and the viewer. Later, when Celeste timidly brings up the suspicions that have haunted her for days, Danny erupts like a wounded animal, revealing glimmers of what he had gone through all those years ago. Celeste’s reaction suggests dumb failure to comprehend, as if she never imagined that her husband had been raped as a child; her subsequent traitorous action, so alien to that of the night of the mugging, suggests a repulsion at Danny’s perceived weakness.

On the other hand, Jimmy’s wife Annabeth (Laura Linney, with a perfect Boston accent) projects an utterly authoritative sense of herself, as the helpmate and lover to the neighborhood’s kingpin. At the end of the movie, she delivers an utterly unbelievable monologue in which she excuses Jimmy’s return to crime by way of the fact that they are strong people who must do what must be done. The articulate words coming out of her character’s mouth just don’t seem right, but what does, infinitely more so, is a shot in which she, surrounded by a loving husband and his loyal capos, directs a laser stare at the hapless Celeste. In these moments, the movie’s penultimate themes of strength vs. weakness, and the impossible quest to sort out a lifetime of guilt and grief, hit home with gale force.

—Laura Leon

Self Portrait

Masked & Anonymous
Directed by Larry Charles

Writer Nik Cohn once famously suggested that the Rolling Stones should have died in an airplane crash at 40. That’s harsh. As it is not nice to wish anyone ill—even a smug, self-deluded artist flailing around in his own mythology—let’s just say that it would have been better for Bob Dylan if he had recently entered a Buddhist monestary and taken a vow of silence. If he had, no one would have had to endure Masked & Anonymous, his cryptic film about an American apocalypse. Bluntly put, it’s a self-indulgent piece of crap.

Set in a futuristic, civil-war-torn America, the film is the story of legendary artist Jack Fate’s (Dylan) last stand. Fate is freed from prison to headline a nationally televised benefit for those poor folks whom promoter Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman) calls “the real victims of this war.” Fate, guitar in hand, prepares to face the TV cameras and (insert portentous pause) his fate. On hand for the grim festivities are blustering journalist Tom Friend (Jeff Bridges); Friend’s neurotically devout girlfriend Pagan Lace (Penélope Cruz); TV producer and coldhearted bitch Nina Veronica (Jessica Lange); Fate’s guardian angel and best friend, Bobby Cupid (Luke Wilson); and Fate’s childhood-pal-turned-nemesis Edmund (Mickey Rourke).

It was necessary to spell out all those characters’ names, if only to provide a taste of the film’s dull-witted symbolism. The script has all the sense of those goofy liner notes Dylan used to dash off in his heyday, when he apparently thought such great albums as John Wesley Harding needed to be accented with pretentious gibberish. All the themes and images from the Dylan oeuvre—just like the spaghetti-sauce ingredients in the old TV ad, they’re in there. Circus freaks, whores and faithless women, parasitical soul-stealers, jovial-but-doomed con men, fucked-up remnants of a lost America. . . . It’s the parade of worn-out Dylanesque clichés, dirtied up with fake blood and prop rags.

That said, Masked & Anonymous isn’t boring. It’s even, at times, quite watchable. The musical performances are first rate. (Memo to Bob: shut up and sing.) The dialogue, cowritten by Dylan and director Larry Charles under the pen names Rene Fontaine and Sergei Petrov, has the snap and cadence of good lyrics. If you didn’t understand English (and there were no subtitles), they would probably be mistaken for poetry. The terrific cast (who accepted next-to-nothing in pay to work with Dylan) have a wonderful time with these lines; Goodman, in particular, makes a silk purse from the verbal sow’s ears; Lange, Rourke, Val Kilmer (as a gutter philosopher), and Ed Harris (as a blackface minstrel) are also notable. Dylan? He’s great whenever he plays straight man to the actors around him. When he’s supposed to show emotion, as in a reunion scene with a former lover (Angela Bassett), he comes off like an antsy old freak.

It’s hard to tell which scene is the most aggravating in this cinematic disaster. Whether it’s the bit when an angelic 10-year-old girl sings “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” to Fate as if it’s a hymn to Bob-on-high, or the last shot in the film, in which the camera stays in tight on Dylan and his smug, creepy smirk as he takes his last ride, the self-regard is breathtaking, and horrifying.

—Shawn Stone

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