God’s Pocket is a small Philadelphia neighborhood
suffering from all sorts of urban ailments, but don’t tell that to the people
who live there because they don’t like to hear it. This film adaptation
of Pete Dexter’s novel by Mad Men star, and first-time director, John
Slattery examines the intersecting lives of several characters stuck in “the
Pocket,” as they call the area with defensive, chip-on-the-shoulder
pride. The late Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Mickey Scarpato, an
independent meat vendor whose downtrodden existence reflects the depressed area
he inhabits. Married to Jeanie (Christina Hendricks), a divorcee with a
troubled teenage son, Mickey spends his days half-heartedly canvassing for
customers, but more enthusiastically conspiring with cronies to hijack
truckloads of beef. When not pursuing larceny, he hangs out at the corner
tap with a cast of barflies who appear to have stumbled in from Eugene
O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh by way of Cheers. But when his
step-son Leon is killed at a construction site, Mickey becomes enmeshed in
pursuing his grief-stricken wife’s wishes to have her son buried in style.
His plans quickly go awry, with some grimly farcical consequences.
For her part, Jeanie refuses to accept the official version
that Leon’s death was an accident and pushes for an investigation, which catches
the attention of jaded columnist Richard Shellburn (Richard Jenkins). His
mild interest in the story changes to ardent pursuit after interviewing the
attractive Jeanie—pursuit of her, that is, not of the truth. Throw in a
couple of bumbling underworld figures and a gun-toting flower shop owner and
you have the formula for what might have been a sharp, quirky comedy with dark
overtones of social commentary. Unfortunately, the raw slice of
blue-collar life atmosphere and the comic plot of mix-ups and mayhem aren’t
blended well. The surprisingly lackadaisical script—by Dexter himself,
along with Slattery and Alex Metcalf—is just occasionally amusing, and
Slattery’s blase direction does nothing to make up for it. The results
are a rather melancholy mélange--mopey but never moving, dopey instead of truly
funny.
The interesting cast, which could have injected novel energy
into the film, instead seems dispirited--none more so than Hoffman.
Mumbling his dialogue and looking like he’d just rolled out of bed and hadn’t
had his first cup of coffee yet, Hoffman plays Mickey in a manner so
self-effacing he almost detaches from the story. Hoffman was a gifted
actor and could live inside a character like few of his contemporaries could,
but in this role he’s emotionally absent and as a result Mickey, a character
with lots of rough edges, comes out flat. You can’t engage the viewer’s
sympathy when you refuse to engage the viewer at all. This late-career
stumble is sad to witness.
As Jeanie, Slattery’s Mad Men cast mate Christina
Hendricks gets to emote more than the sultry secretary she plays on that show,
but she’s still stuck in sexpot mode. This is a disservice to both
actress and character, since Jeanie’s grief is the emotional heart of
the film. Hendricks gamely tries to convey the suffering and the inner
strength of a working class mother at an emotional crossroads but is hampered
by an ungenerous script and conflicted direction. The movie needs her to
be alluring since that is an important point in the plot but like so much of
American cinema, or cinema in general, it fails to integrate her physical
attractiveness into her humanity. Despite frumpy dresses and a dearth of
make-up, she’s simply too glamorous for the part, and the attempts to downgrade
her looks while at the same time exploiting them are rather absurd.
Fortunately, Richard Jenkins has a much better time of it
with the star-crossed journalist Shellburn. It’s chiefly in his scenes
that the film finds its tone since he alone of the principle actors taps into
the story’s sub-current of irony. Despite working with similar emotive
constraints as Hoffman--like Mickey, Shellburn is sleep-walking through
life—he’s not hampered by them but instead uses them to explore the at once
comic and sad limitations of his character. The reawakening of erotic
longing brings Shellburn out of his shell just far enough to realize he still
has a job to do, and something to write about. Sadly, he blows the
opportunity. Myopic, self-serving, frequently off-putting, this ill-fated
character provides the second half of film with some much-needed focus.
The culmination of his story arc pulls the people of God’s Pocket
together for a disturbing, ironic finale, a devastating scene that, despite the futility it depicts, saves the movie itself from feeling futile.
But God’s Pocket is still a mostly inarticulate film,
uncertain of what it’s trying to say about life in its particular part of the
world. On top of that it’s unpleasant to look at. Lance
Acord‘s muddy cinematography gives many of its interiors a yellowish brown
tinge, rendering images only partially visible, but without artistic
effect as compensation. There’s no art here, just obscurity, as if we're watching the action
through a dirty window. The grimy look may match the depressed spirits of
the surroundings, but it adds no layer of expression to what we’re shown--it
just strains our eyesight. In fact, the muddled visuals reflect the
film’s major shortcomings: the inconsistency of tone, the obscurity of motive,
the lack of genuine urgency to any of the events. The poverty of
God’s Pocket never seems like a social problem worth solving. The
fumblings of the characters never transform comedy (tepid, at best) into viable
satire of society or the human condition. The desperate characters never
seem desperate enough for any of that. The Lower Depths this is not. It's not that good a neighborhood.
