OUT OF THE FURNACE **

Scott Cooper's flawed follow up to Crazy Heart is a thinly painted portrait on a rich canvas - lacking ethnographic research he creates a rather mundane thriller that otherwise showed promise.

Out of the Furnace, 110 minutes, director: Scott Cooper ** of 4 stars

Out of the Furnace is a peculiar picture: pure 1970s gritty realism crossed exploring the painfully and continually relevant effects of war including PTSD. The problem is Out of the Furnace offers the potential for a rich portrait wrapped in a thriller concerned in its third act less with character and more with vengeance. Character is the story’s problem – set in the rust belt town of Braddock, PA (as seen in the beautiful Levi’s Go Forth campaign directed by Sin Nobre filmmaker Cary Fukunaga) the film never provides a deep exploration of these characters beyond the research co-writers Brad Ingelsby and Scott Cooper did, likely reading articles in the Bergen Record.

The story pins Christian Bale, who serves time for a deadly DUI against Woody Harrelson’s Harlan DeGroat – described as an inbreed from the Ramapo Hills. Here is where I thought this picture might shed some light on my neighbors – but herein lies the problem – I imagine it’s very difficult to study these folks. So here’s, simply what Urban Dictionary tells me when I google ‘DeGraot Ringwood NJ’

Term used by caucasian people of Ringwood and Mahwah, NJ and Suffern , NY for what were called Jackson Whites, a mixed race people who lived there for 300 years. Mineys now call themselves Ramapough Indians, but are not recgonized as an Indian nation by the feds

They were usually poor and underemployed. They once had jobs in the iron mines until World War II. Once the mines closed, they found jobs at a Ford assembly plant in Mahwah, NJ until it closed.

This is could make the for the subject of a very interesting ethnographic study although I have heard stories about just how difficult an ethnographic study this could be. Cult magazine Weird NJ attempted to unpack the history of the Jackson Whites in a lengthy study tracing blood lines – this would be ripe for documentary filmmaking, perhaps someone from this population will go to college and obtain an MFA in Documentary Filmmaking so that this history can be properly unpacked. Out of the Furnace has been controversial because of precisely what it isn’t – well researched.

Ending this rant I will continue to review the film – but that remains my core problem with it. It portrays a group with a sensitive history as nothing more than a device (kind of like an Adam Sandler movie that portrayed a whole gender as a device – you can see the appalling misogynistic treatment of women in many films but especially Just Go With It).

Out of the Furnace tells a simple story in an interesting place – Braddock, PA reminds me of my travels briefly last winter, teaching in a Rural enclave outside of Erie. Some of the towns I had visited in my travels (keep in mind alone, I didn’t have many friends in town) were a little like Braddock, once functioning engines of commerce with solid middle class jobs wrecked when said jobs moved oversees. This is the stuff of Bruce Springsteen’s last album, of course.

The film’s performances are quite good including Casey Affleck as Rodney, an Iraq War vet who participates in a fight club run by bar backroom numbers runner John (played by Willem Dafoe). When Bale’s Russell offers to pay back John what he’s owed, Rodney instead doubles down setting the story in motion, late in its third act.

The character driven drama which develops rather nicely in the first act runs off the trails in its third, cramming all the action that you see in the trailer into 30-minutes that don’t quite add up along with subplots (like Zoe Saldana’s Lena, Russell’s girlfriend before prison now married to the police Chief played by Forest Whitaker). The Place Beyond the Pines this is not – that film took its time developing three stories that functioned like a chain reaction, slightly flawed that was a glorious film.

Out of the Furnace does a lot right – it’s beautifully photographed and has some strong acting, script and structure is the film’s fetal flaw. Director Scott Cooper has a rich canvas that he has not made the most of.