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Double Exposure Review: The Skeleton Twins

Double Exposure Review: The Drop

by Taylor Sinople on September 14, 2014

Editor’s note: Our “Double Exposure” reviews pit two or more critics against one another on the same film to hash out their differences in opinion. Agree with what we have to say or want to offer your own take? Leave it in the comments below.


The Rundown


Taylor Avatar
Taylor Sinople
Final Rating: 7 out of 10
Bottom Line:  “The Drop” may end up being too meditative for some viewers, but with Hardy’s exceptionally watchable persona, Gandolfini’s final, complex performance, and an unspooling mess of lies to uncover, there’s enough going on to entertain despite the slow pacing. 

Josef Avatar
Josef Rodriguez
Final Rating: 3.5 out of 10
Bottom Line: Although Tom Hardy puts in another great performance, “The Drop” is a vague, murkily edited, and cliched crime drama that offers viewers nothing they haven’t seen a thousand times before.


Old-time tough guy Marv (the late James Gandolfini) used to own his bar in Brooklyn, now he just runs it. Ten years ago Chechen gangsters came in and started using Cousin Marv’s as a “drop bar.” Now, while it still serves as a borough favorite, it also plays host to the city’s dirty money. But when Marv’s glum, reserved bartender Bob (Tom Hardy) finds a young puppy discarded in a trash bin, he unknowingly becomes involved in a small-time plot to knock-off the bar in a series of events that will reveal the neighborhood’s decade-old secrets.

Taylor Sinople: As Tom Hardy’s career goes on, he’s becoming an actor whose talent is being magnified by a cumulative effect. Each role makes the others better by comparison. In “The Drop,” Hardy strips away the precise, intelligent Welshman he played in 2013’s “Locke” to sculpt a soft-spoken New York City former-thug as Bob.

Similarly, we’re seeing James Gandolfini in an interesting position as the tough guy who gets out-toughed. When “The Drop” starts, we understand Gandolfini’s performance entirely, because it’s more or less the role he was born to play. But after his bar is hit for $5,000 of a crime lord’s money, he’s on the line for the cash with men that far outstrip his corner-store gangster reach, and we’re left with a shade of intimidation and desperate fear we’ve never seen from the actor.

Josef Rodriguez: I do agree that this is one of Tom Hardy’s best performances, another in a string of completely diverse and challenging ones that we’ve seen in the past couple of years, and I think that he is “The Drop’s” greatest asset. The film almost works as a character study of his personality, and how he lives as if he’s atoning for something he did in his past. However, as much as I loved the performance, I’m a little tired of the mysterious-former-thug trope, although I do think it was handled fairly well in the 2nd and 3rd acts of this film. Gandolfini, on the other hand, was just playing a less perverse version of his character in “Killing Them Softly,” where he was a washed-up hit man called in to do some dirty work. I liked the more sensitive aspects of his character and I wish the film had given more of a perspective into his past, but the performance didn’t blow me away like his work in “Enough Said” or “The Sopranos.”

Taylor: Gandolfini didn’t have much of a shot of surpassing “Enough Said” with the one-two hit of his performance in that film being both unexpected and first-rate, but I think he paints Marv with many more shades of complexity than he could have. Each scene with Marv reveals a bit more about how he interacts with people based on his opinions of them — a relevant exercise in a story filled with lies and betrayals. In terms of that “non-acting,” “real guy” appeal that defines his best roles, I don’t think Gandolfini has been this good as a criminal/gangster like Tony Soprano since Tony Soprano. He takes something like the “I used to be somebody / and that meant something” speech – something seemingly written out of obligation to the genre – and reads it with real conviction. What I would have liked, though, with this being his final performance, is for the material to line-up with his talent. He works overtime on Marv, but it would be an incredible moment to see him dominate the best written monologue of the year – something “The Drop” doesn’t offer.
 
Josef: Definitely. The character just wasn’t on par with Gandolfini’s talent. Whether that was a result of writing or editing, I’ll always see “Enough Said” as Gandolfini’s final on-screen hurrah, if only because of how affecting it is. This film, admittedly, had a very well-written “I used to be somebody” speech, made all the better by Gandolfini’s delivery, but it’s the only notable moment in the film when Gandolfini’s character is given anything more to do than be angry and racist. As much as those two characteristics can be enough to make a great, well-developed character, the writing here just didn’t do enough to justify Marv’s two-dimensionality, especially when Bob is so well-explored.

the-drop-2

Taylor: “The Drop” isn’t set in Boston, but there’s no mistaking it as a Dennis Lehane story. Lehane (“Mystic River,” “Gone Baby Gone,” “Shutter Island”) wrote the screenplay himself based on his 2010 short story “Animal Rescue.” Seedy bars and small-time crime are the “where” and “what,” and men with more going on in their head than they let on is the “who.” As the story of Marv’s bar and Bob’s relationship with Nadia (Noomi Rapace, of the original “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”) – a woman who helps him take care of the trash-bin puppy – goes on, we see more and more secrets coming to light. Characters who shouldn’t know each other do. The narrative is the unfolding of events premeditated by the characters prior to the start of the film, and the slow-burning effect is in finding out this parish’s secrets.

Josef: From the perspective of a New Yorker, this was probably one of the worst depictions of New York I’ve seen in any recent crime movie. The bar patrons in the opening scenes have Boston accents, none of the housing stays consistent from block-to-block, and the dreary, Catholic-guilt laden backdrop feels painfully out of place. It’s almost as if it were filmed in Boston and then someone decided to have it changed to New York at the last minute. Quite possibly the weakest aspect of this film is director Michael R. Roskam’s world-building abilities, which were put to great use in “Bullhead” but are entirely absent in “The Drop.” Scenes come and go with no geographical or cultural contextualization, and after a certain point I just stopped caring because everything felt so flat.

Check out our list of the Top 10 Portrayals of New York City in Cinema!

Taylor: Yes, I noticed the bad accents right away. And world-building was the last place Roskam needed to drop the ball with the film. I found each of the film’s primary interiors – the bar, Bob’s house, and Nadia’s house, to be well-captured and staged. The space between those three locations, though, is utterly essential to understand in order to fully buy into the “tight knit neighborhood” conceit, but instead it seems each exterior scene is a miscellaneous New York City Crime Movie Location. I would have loved to absorb the atmosphere of a story that distinctly takes place on a couple of blocks of city streets. We don’t even get a good look at the storefront of Marv’s bar! The characters are still living on for me at this point, but if we could walk away feeling we really knew where this story takes place, “The Drop” could have been closer to unforgettable.
 
Josef: Yeah, I definitely agree with this, especially after seeing “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby” on the same day. Both are filmed in New York, but one is so quintessentially New York (“Eleanor Rigby”), while the other is so anonymous as to not establish an identity of its own, which definitely hurt the film in the end.
I also think some blame can be placed on the editing, which is choppy at best and utterly incoherent at worst. Most of the film felt like filler, and I think the story, which barely qualifies as minor, would have been much more effective at around 80 minutes, seeing that the film is being adapted from a short story. John Ortiz’s character added absolutely nothing to the story, and the finer details of the story could have probably used some more attention, especially involving Gandolfini’s character and past, which are only vaguely alluded to in a kind of noncommittal way. It was all very “ambiguous indie film,” but it didn’t convince me when the opening scene is literally just an expositional monologue with footage that can barely be considered a step above B-roll.

Taylor: I saw the same things as you, but reacted to them differently. To me, after it rips off the genre tropes, the cop character, and the shoddy locations, what’s left of distinction is the positioning of all crucial information outside the boundaries of the narrative we see on screen. We’re watching the execution and consequences of pre-meditated events, not the planning of them. For that reason, I was okay with not initially picking up clear-cut motives. It was thrilling to witness the plot uncoiling without having seen key early scenes – as if the first act was left out. We don’t get into Marv’s or Bob’s heads, making us a spectator more than a participator, but that was something unique in the midst of convention so I really honed in on it. I think it’s more daring than just about anything else “The Drop” offers, and by the end of the film I did feel that I understood these characters – even if that came from more assumption and imagination than clear information as there are no flash-backs or persistent internal narration to fill us in on what happened before we meet Bob and Marv.
 
Josef: See, for me, this movie was all planning with little execution, in the sense that these normally archetypal characters are shown before their “big shakedowns.” My favorite scene in this movie involves Eric Deeds (Matthias Schoenaerts), a low-rent thug who targets Bob, in Nadia’s house, rehearsing what he’s going to say before he says it. I feel like this is one of the few moments where Roskam’s decision to comprise the film for mostly “in-between” moments really paid off. I can see what you mean when you say that this movie was all execution and no planning, but it’s also important to note that a lot of what goes on in this movie is just the completely unglamorous ins-and-outs of planning a shoddy robbery.
the-drop-3
Taylor: This is, on paper, ready for over-embellishment of style, but part of the quiet allure of “The Drop” is in director Michael R. Roskam’s realistic approach. He strikes the right balance of mood and naturalism, making “The Drop” a memorable crime drama that can be recalled more for its best dialogue than an overwrought portrayal of style and violence – in other words, it is unglamorous and slow-moving, but that’s what I ended up liking about it.

There are some pitfalls of the genre that make their way into this film, like John Ortiz’s detective character who, like many crime drama cops, appears to be the only on-duty officer in New York City yet is persistently capable of showing up at all the right places at all the right times. While there are also a few “evil Russian” (Chechen in this case) stereotypes on display, it’s Matthias Schoenaerts’s unpredictable antagonist character that gives Hardy and Gandolfini an equal match to spar with.

Josef: None of the film’s villains, particularly the Russian villain archetypes, really came off as menacing. And Matthias Schoenaerts’ character, whose scenes are essentially comprised of him showing up in places and looking scary, never struck me as anything more than a character that existed only to prove the superiority of Hardy’s character.

Taylor: How did you feel about the use of the dog, Rocco, as the implicator of most of what happens on-screen? Did you feel the ties between Rocco and Bob were too obvious and literary  (drawing quick parallels between what someone may assume about a pitbull and a guy like Bob) or a helpful addition of complexity?

Josef: I think the dog was extremely crucial to the story. I think the dog is really the only character or object in the film that clearly differentiates Eric and Bob based on how we see them treat the dog. By the end, Rocco helps further solidify that Bob does what he does out of necessity, while Eric does it simply to create chaos, which is a crucial distinction to make in this seedy crime underworld.

Continue Reading Issue #20
Language

English

Release

September 12, 2014

Runtime

1 hr. 46 min.

Genre

Crime, Drama

MPAA Rating

R

Director

Michaël R. Roskam

Cast

Tom Hardy, James Gandolfini, Noomi Rapace, Matthias Schoenaerts, John Ortiz, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Michael Aronov, Michael Esper, Ann Dowd

(All Features), (All Reviews), Crime, Double Exposures, Drama, Features, Issue #20, Reviews
Ann DowdDennis LehaneElizabeth RodriguezJames GandolfiniJohn OrtizMatthias SchoenaertsMichael AronovMichael EsperMichaël R. RoskamNoomi RapaceThe DropTom Hardy
Ann Dowd, Dennis Lehane, Elizabeth Rodriguez, James Gandolfini, John Ortiz, Matthias Schoenaerts, Michael Aronov, Michael Esper, Michaël R. Roskam, Noomi Rapace, The Drop, Tom Hardy
About the Author
Taylor Sinople
Taylor Sinople
Taylor is a Chicago-based writer and aspiring film historian. He is the editor here at TFP, and has contributed to a number of international publications such as Cinema Scandinavia, PopMatters, and Room 101 Magazine. He can also be found listening to podcasts, researching topics he has little use for, or running after a city bus.
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