God's Pocket: Sundance 2014 - first look review (original) (raw)
Down in the lint of God's pocket rests Leon, a flick-knife wielding toerag so disreputable that when a co-worker snapped and conked him on the head, everyone swore blind it was an accident. But Leon's mum (Christina Hendricks) knows something's not right about her little boy's death, so her luckless husband (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is sent off to look for clues and enough cash to put the little bastard in the ground.
Mad Men star John Slattery's directional debut roots around in familiar muck. His depiction of God's Pocket - a fictional South Philly neighbourhood crawling with drunks, hucksters and vagabonds - near weeps with the blue collar romanticism of David O Russell's The Fighter. But it's in digging out the black humour in the petty criminal's scrap to survive that Slattery distinguishes himself.
Based on the 1983 novel by Pete Dexter (author of The Paperboy), God's Pocket sketches out a rough world of grand dreams and dust-ups. Mickey Scarpato (Hoffman) is an outsider, drawn into the Pocket by marriage to his beautiful wife (Hendricks). Mickey has learnt to play local. He drinks, he gambles, he steals vanloads of meat to hawk on to traders who don't ask questions ("I only see what I'm looking at").
Mickey's better at this adopted life than Richard Shelburn (Richard Jenkins), another non-native who has carved out minor celebrity status as a newspaper columnist, selling the proud work-hard, live-hard ethos of the Pocket back to it's denizens. Shelburn, alcoholic and creatively knackered, sets ups much of the film's bleak humour. He espouses pompous monologues about the neighbourhood ("I knew the city. I had lain with her") and its people ("simple men who rarely leave"). You wonder how much of Shelburn's crowd-pleasing phoniness has bled back into our own ideal of the working class neighbourhood. Are we all just buying into the myth of the hard-working, free-wheeling Joe?
Perhaps, but there's plenty in that caricature to sustain this film. Mickey's quest to bury Leon takes him around a rogue's gallery of local faces. The funeral director who spills his beer on a corpse ("It's OK. It's an Irish funeral"), Mickey's partner in crime (John Turturro) , who can only cut up their stolen meat when the power's not out. Everyone's fighting to live in a world that hates them.
God's Pocket has no subtlety. Those who found The Paperboy too rich a brew may well turn their nose up at its brashness. But - through the Irish jokes, the Italian jokes, the corpse as comedy jokes - it has a dark heart that stays beating. No-one here is good, no-one will escape, no-one deserves to. You can question God's plans, but he'll always have you in pocket.