Out of the Furnace (2013) [Blu-ray]
Crime | Drama | Thriller

Tagline: Sometimes your battles choose you.

From Scott Cooper, the critically acclaimed writer and director of Crazy Heart, comes a gripping and powerful drama about family, fate, circumstance and justice. Russell Baze (Oscar Winner Christian Bale) leads a dead-end life - he works a meaningless steel mill job all day, and cares for his terminally ill father at night. When Russell's brother Rodney (Casey Affleck) returns home from Iraq, he is lured into one of the Northeast's most ruthless crime rings and mysteriously disappears. When the police fail to solve the case, Russell puts his life at risk in order to seek justice for his brother. This absorbing film features a knockout cast that includes Woody Harrelson, Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe, Zoe Saldana and Sam Shepard.

Storyline: Russell and his younger brother Rodney live in the economically-depressed Rust Belt, and have always dreamed of escaping and finding better lives. But when a cruel twist of fate lands Russell in prison, his brother becomes involved with one of the most violent and ruthless crime rings in the Northeast - a mistake that will cost him everything. Once released, Russell must choose between his own freedom, or risk it all to seek justice for his brother. Written by Production

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman on March 11, 2014 -- There's a certain melancholy to a lot of country music that seemed to make Scott Cooper's Crazy Heart redolent with a kind of ragged sensibility that was perhaps best summed up by the title of its Academy Award winning song, "The Weary Kind". There's a different kind of sadness running rampant in Cooper's latest, the dour but often compelling Out of the Furnace, a film that in lesser hands might have been more of a straight ahead revenge thriller without much to recommend it other than a visceral killing or two. The revenge aspect of Out of the Furnace almost plays out as a tangent here, though, for there's a deeper tack that Cooper ends up exploiting, a penetrating examination of lives with no hope for a better future, but with an innate nobility nonetheless. That nobility is weathered, though, filled with the scuffs and scars of experiences that seem to echo some perverse mantra of "life isn't fair". While the film really concentrates on the travails of hardscrabble steel mill worker Russell Baze (Christian Bale), the film's dark, moody ambience is established from virtually the first moment with a modern day update of the iconic scene with Jimmy Cagney and Mae Clark in The Public Enemy, only in this instance we're dealing with a much more dangerously sociopathic criminal named Harlan (Woody Harrelson) , a character who isn't about to punish his nemeses with something as relatively harmless as a grapefruit. It's a startling opening scene, one which assault the viewer with virtually as much force as Harlan assaults his perceived antagonists in the film, and it quickly creates a stifling mood of terror and impending doom. That mood was palpable enough to actually foster a lawsuit filed by a group of plaintiffs who share a surname with Harlan's character and who claim the film maliciously maligns not just their name but their ethnic heritage (the plaintiffs are part of a recently state recognized Native American tribe which has yet to receive Federal designation).

Part of what makes Out of the Furnace such a depressing viewing experience is that Russell Baze (Christian Bale) is obviously a basically decent guy with his head screwed on straight, but he can't seem to get a break. As the post- credits film opens, he's at least happy in his home life with his girlfriend, Lena (Zoë Saldana), though his elderly father is at death's door, and his little brother Rodney (Casey Affleck) is suffering from PTSD after having returned from his latest of several deployments to Iraq, burying his psychological stress with an unhealthy gambling addiction. Russell questions Rodney as to where he's getting his cash, and Rodney kind of vaguely states that he's getting it from a local guy named John Petty (Willem Dafoe). What turns out to be the case is that Rodney has been appearing in staged fights for Petty, with Petty asking him to "take a fall" so that Petty can pay of his debts.

That ultimately brings Rodney, Petty and even Russell into contact with Harlan, who is, in the words of Petty in the film, a member of a bunch of "inbred" mountain people (hence the aforementioned lawsuit). In the meantime, a frankly unnecessary trauma (considering the roiling emotional environment the film has already essayed) results in Russell being jailed, and during his confinement, his father passes away and Lena ends up marrying a local policeman (Forrest Whitaker). Rodney at least stays in touch with his brother, though it's obvious his mental state is deteriorating in a rather radical fashion.

Despite its rather starry cast, Out of the Furnace failed to connect at the box office, despite debuting in a week when there weren't many other new big releases to contend with (meaning, ones that opened the same week this film did). It's really not hard to understand why. This is a fairly relentlessly dour and downtrodden feeling film, one that takes Russell through an almost Job-like series of trials and tribulations. Is there a silver lining in all the depression? With regard to the characters and the general plotline, surprisingly little. Several characters meet their (quite bloody) fates, but even Russell, who (and no great spoiler here) at least makes it through the film alive, is obviously one of the walking (spiritually as well as physically) wounded.

The saving grace here is the honesty of the performances, though it must be added that several of these actors engage in what has become known as "mumblecore". Even Forest Whitaker spools out his lines in little one or two word increments at times, making this film feel even more interminable than its already pretty gritty environment does to begin with. Harrelson has rarely been better, though, and his Harlan is a truly frightening creation. There's also an absolutely palpable sense of place in this film, and as someone whose mother was born and raised on the outskirts of Pittsburgh and as someone who still has an untold amount of cousins in the surrounding Pennsylvania countryside, I can vouch for the fact that Cooper has brilliantly caught the ambience of the locale. The film's screenplay involves a few too many conveniences for its own good (including an improbably placed cell phone call that provides impetus for the final act), but its depiction of two troubled brothers finding their own way through the thicket is often quite riveting, if never uplifting.

My colleague Brian Orndorf evidently like Out of the Furnace a bit more than I did, and so for those who might want a second opinion, I refer you to Brian's review. There's no denying the gritty honesty of this film, at least with regard to Russell's character, but so much horrible stuff happens to the poor guy that you almost feel like he's wandered in from a bus and truck version of The Book of Job. While Harrelson's Harlan is a truly unforgettable character, he's so hyperbolic that he almost seems ported in from some ultra-dramatic entity featuring a version of Snidely Whiplash, albeit a backwoods iteration. The screenplay gets a lot of the dialogue just right, and the feel of the blue collar working class folks is also laudable, but this is one big downer from start to finish. The technical aspects of the disc are first rate, and despite my foregoing caveats, for those who like the cast, Out of the Furnace comes Recommended.

[CSW] -2.2-Another reviewer put it better than I could with the following:

It's unfair to label Out of the Furnace a bad film. It's well shot. The setting is effectively imposing and formidable. The performances are nuanced and engaging. The sense of time is easily understood. Unfortunately, the positives end there. While it's an authentic and good-looking film, the lazy, heavy-handed script offers very little originality and rings mostly untrue. "Furnace" could be accurately described as "gritty", a genuine look at blue-collar, lower-middle class people. It's a fairly simple "good guys vs. bad guys" revenge film that avoids melodrama by instead opting to be boring. As it slowly plods along, it becomes increasingly clear that it has no interest in allowing us to infer anything about the subtler points of the story. The emotions it forces on us are manipulative and unnatural, and the dialogue is so heavy-handed and full of clichés I felt I was watching a student film. The high-points are the performances, making this film more than a waste. Bale continues to prove he is our generation's Deniro, deftly bringing subtlety and gravitas to every role. Affleck is proceeding to best his more famous brother, Ben, in every role. Saldana is great, and hopefully will be given better material someday. Unfortunately, there is very little for any of these guys to work with here. So no matter how powerful the movie seems to think it is, the mediocre writing and poor direction prove otherwise.

It's me again: It is too slow for most folks but if you don't have anything else to do it might, just might be worth a rental.
[V4.5-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.


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