movies
It’s All
Cotton
Candy
THE THIN BLUE LINE IS ERASED
IN DIRECTOR S. CRAIG ZAHLER’S
GLORIOUS HEIST FILM DRAGGED
ACROSS CONCRETE
By Rick Levin
K
eeping things simple, let’s assign
the most recent advent of American
independent cinema to a single movie,
Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 debut Sex,
Lies, and Videotape. Granted, this is a
somewhat arbitrary designation, and
yet that stark, downbeat film seems, in
retrospect, to have heralded a new generation of auteur
filmmakers who, forsaking big budgets and formulaic
hash, worked to re-establish movies as true art without
losing one jot of their entertainment value.
Along with Soderbergh came a slew of young
filmmakers who, for all their renegade techniques and
streetwise hep, looked like the second coming of Roger
Corman’s kids: Gus Van Sant, Quentin Tarantino and
Richard Linklater, to name but a notable few. Like
Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman before them, these
innovative directors injected their work with a raw energy
and instinctive intelligence that helped re-establish film
as a legit form of avant-garde pop art.
And, as Tarantino, Van Sant and others of their ilk have
entered the mainstream, the risk and revelation they first
confronted us with have been absorbed and neutralized,
their stylishness turned into cinematic tropes we all know
like the back of our hand.
Watching writer/director S. Craig Zahler’s latest film,
Dragged Across Concrete, I felt the same jolt of excitement
I received when I came across Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs
in 1992. Unlike Tarantino’s excellent heist film, however,
which unspools in flashbacks with an unhinged energy,
Zahler’s heist caper takes its sweet time, delivering
itself unto a remorseless wrenching up of suspense that
explodes only after every side street and alleyway is
investigated.
“It’s a bad idea,” Anthony Lurasetti (the inimitable
Vince Vaughn) tells his partner, Brett Ridgeman (Mel
Gibson). “It’s bad for you and it’s bad for me. It’s bad like
lasagna in a can.” These two New York cops, having been
suspended after a video of their recent “brutal” arrest has
been released to the media, are contemplating robbing a
big-time criminal they’ve been tipped off to. They have
their reasons. Everybody in Dragged has his reasons, and
they are neither good nor bad.
One of the unusual strengths of this film is precisely
that: It delves with intimate detail into the humanity of
each character, revealing the social and economic forces
that drive them, individually and collectively, to such
desperate measures. A sticky web of fate catches up each
person involved in this intrigue, until actions are revealed
as being at once inevitable and avoidable — the cosmic
compound error of life itself. And as that web slowly
collapses upon itself over the course of the film — delving
into narratives that seem pointless until their point is
devastatingly driven home — you find yourself rooting for
everyone and no one.
The cast is fantastic — especially Gibson, who delivers
his best performance in years. The dialogue is blistering,
and so beyond that pale of propriety that it gives Martin
McDonagh a run for his money. Zahler’s pacing is patient
and yet jittery, like watching a high-speed, multi-vehicle
wreck in excruciating slow motion; he trusts the audience
to trust him, which is a rare quality in a young director.
The whole look and feel of the film is shadowy and
decayed, shot through with a sense of cosmic reckoning
— imagine Michael Mann’s vision of L.A. minus the steely
surfaces and neon shine, and you’re approaching Zahler’s
perspective on the modern urban jungle.
Side characters appear and disappear, some for good,
while others suddenly reappear with a new, startling
significance. One such is Henry Johns (Tory Kittles, so
good), an ex-con who becomes a driver in the heist the
cops accidentally stumble upon. Johns, struggling to
support his strung-out mother and disabled brother,
becomes the mirror image of Gibson’s character, a
financially strapped cop with a sick wife and aggrieved
teenaged daughter who can’t afford to move his family
from their besieged neighborhood.
“It’s all cotton candy,” Vaughn’s character says several
times, a statement that takes on an increasingly ominous
meaning as the plot unfolds: Like that spun confection,
the sweetness disappears, leaving corrosion in its wake.
Dark, violent and, at times, wickedly funny, Zahler’s film
harkens to the golden era of independent film — from Dog
Day Afternoon to The French Connection, from The Wild
Bunch to Taxi Driver — though it’s hardly an exercise in
simple nostalgia. Dragged Across Concrete is very much
of the here and now: an existential crime thriller whose
slow boil signals a social breakdown that feels all too real.
(Broadway Metro)
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