God's Pocket

Perhaps John Slattery’s status as the star of television’s Mad Men explains how he garnered such a top drawer cast for his debut feature as a director. If the result is anything to go by it certainly wasn’t his chops behind the camera.  God’s Pocket, an adaptation of a Pete Dexter novel, is a disorienting affair, a film that seems initially to be an exercise in American working class realism that wanders into black comedy territory and can’t find its way out.

In a story seemingly set in the 1970s, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Mickey Scarpato who’s married to Jeanie (Christina Hendricks) and good buddies with Bird (John Turturro).  When  Jeanie’s wastrel  son, Leon (Caleb Landry Jones) ,is killed on the job at a construction site, Mickey sets about organizing the funeral. But Jeanie suspects that it wasn’t an accident.  Then local celebrity columnist Richard Shellburn (Richard Jenkins) turns up to do a piece on the hard life of working stiffs in God’s Pocket (the Philadelphian equivalent.to the once oft-featured Manhattan neighbourhood, Hell's Kitchen).

Whatever Slattery was trying to do with this film he got it wrong.  Hoffman, Turturro, Jenkins and Eddie Marsan, who in an nicely uncharacteristic role plays a funeral director, Smiling Jack, are all fine but  why would you cast Christina Hendricks as a lumpenproletariat housewife (or for that matter make Hoffman an Italo-American)?  Perhaps to give some raison d’être to the burning lust of the booze-sozzled Shellburn, an element which becomes one of the main narrative threads.  But this aspect of the film is so gauchely handled, coming out of nowhere and retiring to the same place, that Hendricks seems even more incongruous (at one point Slattery shoots her from the bottom of some stairs, the foreshortening emphasizing her already very prominent  chest. And, while on the subject of camera-work, cinematographer Lance Acord’s fondness for shooting directly into the light only serves to make the already lugubriously lit interiors even harder to decipher).

The most appealing parts of the film lie in its Coen-esque black comedy tendencies, in particular Mickey and Bird’s constant pursuit of easy money and Mickey’s ham-fisted attempts to organize Leon’s funeral (does anyone know how Smiling Jack got Leon's corpse out of his coffin?).  If only Slattery had held to this spirit God’s Pocket could have been an amusing outing.  As it turned out, it is a film divided against itself. It’s worth seeing for the performances, just be prepared to smooth over the stylistic discontinuities yourself.  

Available from: Madman

 

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