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THE DROP (MA)
Stars: Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, James Gandolfini, Matthias Schoenaerts
Director: Michael R. Roskam
Screening: selected cinemas
Rating: ★★★
HAVING made his name as formidably muscular, extraordinary characters in the likes of Bronson and The Dark Knight Rises, the fine English actor Tom Hardy is now exploring the everyday.
He played a desperately conciliatory family man hanging on the telephone in Locke and now comes Bob Saginowski, the shy, shuffling bartender at the centre of The Drop – asimmering crime drama set in a corner of Brooklyn time forgot.
‘‘A sphinx’’ is how one regular describes him, and Bob’s life is so economical he’s not even sure he can look after the battered, bloody puppy he finds one night dumped in the garbage can of Nadia (Noomi Rapace), a wary local whose scars begin on her neck and end in her subconscious.
The Drop has several other characters whose outlines sound equally familiar: Bob’s unfulfilled cousin Marv (James Gandolfini, impeccable in his final performance) runs the bar for the Chechen gangsters who vanquished him eight years prior. Eric (Matthias Schoenaerts) is the suburb’s loose screw, a threatening presence who starts to stalk Bob because he sees him with Nadia.
What makes them close to compelling as people is the terse but informative dialogue of screenwriter Dennis Lehane, leaving behind the Boston of Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone to expand his short story Animal Rescue, and the taut scenes composed around it by director Michael R. Roskam.
Three years ago, with Schoenaerts as his leading man, the Belgian filmmaker shot Bullhead, a roiling study of a man suffused with violence. Bob, while equally reticent, is seemingly nowhere near as threatening. His distance from others could either be wary shyness or a sign of autism, but the movie never sacrifices the uneasy mood for excessive clarity.
A robbery at the bar, which occasionally serves as a clearing house for illegal proceeds, exposes Bob and Marv to their menacing overseers, but in this rundown world, illegality is par for the course. Marv is struggling to pay for his father’s hospital care, and the option is to send him to ‘‘a lesser place’’ – a destination that looms as the likely option for so many of these characters as their lives fray.
European filmmakers such as Niels Arden Oplev (Dead Man Down) and Guillaume Canet (Blood Ties) have recently failed with moody American crime films, but Roskam succeeds. The Drop stays impressively tight: a handful of lives in the balance and a 2am deadline make for an arresting conclusion.
