'We Own the Night' Lacking

By Dan Moore

Published Oct. 16, 2007

"We Own the Night" director James Gray is the "Screw you, clown!" joke of directors. He builds a living, breathing atmosphere as few can, fills it with characters who have the capacity for thought, shoots it in a way that seems to solidify his status as an auteur in the making and then gives a terrible, unbelievably unfulfilling punch-line to it in the form of a plot that is hackneyed and poorly resolved all at once. His latest, a crime drama, is a setting, an atmosphere, in search of a story.

Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix are the stars of this film, which has a story as old as the movies. Wahlberg plays a devoted cop, while Phoenix, his brother, floats around on the wrong end of the law, never explicitly flouting it but unconcerned when his business (he runs a nightclub) puts him in his brother's crosshairs.

When Phoenix's club is raided, his Russian mob backers, who don't know he's related to cops, put a hit on his brother, forcing him to work with his estranged brother and police chief father (Robert Duvall).

Gray, who also wrote the film, does little to add verve to this story. Phoenix is given a rare sympathetic thriller girlfriend (Eva Mendes) who's neither two-timing him nor dragging him down, but little is done with her. Wahlberg and Phoenix, with little to do themselves, give mostly uninspired performances. Wahlberg, in particular, is left to wallow in his poorly explained post-traumatic stress. Duvall's performance is excellent, but there's not enough of it.

Gray's forte is atmosphere, and his twin view of 1988 (the culture and counterculture — both filled with artifacts of the dead seventies) is remarkable. Every scene is alive with details. The potato-salad-and-church-gym police party, peopled with reluctantly overdressed children and adults who are pleasantly surprised that they've had a little too much to drink, brought back remembrances of wedding receptions past.

The nightclub, where disco still lives, throbs with "Heart of Glass" in the opening scene, and by the end, as though its time has passed, is replete with a kitschy floor show and a dour-looking crowd.

But all this outstanding filmmaking isn't enough to offset the deflating effect of its ending, which somehow manages to lack both of the typical options. There is no closure, and in lieu of closure there is no artistic, practiced uncertainty. Things just roll to a stop, leaving the audience to wonder: It took two hours to get to this? All that build-up to the guy just yelling at the clown?

There's no doubt that Gray is a filmmaker with immense talent, as "We Own the Night" is one of the most technically accomplished films of the year. But as a writer, he seems to have no idea what makes stories work; he'd be best off leaving it to someone else in the future, so he can direct a screenplay with unique characters who do and think like the characters of "We Own the Night" do not.