God's Pocket

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.