Scott Frank knows what he’s doing. He specializes in crime
stories, heists and mysteries, serious-minded and skillfully puzzled out. With
his scripts for the likes of Minority
Report and Out of Sight and his
2007 directorial debut The Lookout,
he crafts stories of dangerous, or at least resourceful, people trapped in
unfortunate situations. A Walk Among the
Tombstones, his latest film as writer and director, is hard and hardboiled,
the stuff of typewriter clacks, bottles of brown liquor, and gristle. It’s a
detective story about a man with deep psychological wounds who works quietly in
the shadows. He doesn’t like what he does, but needs to do it as a way of
working through his past mistakes.
Frank’s filmmaking craftsmanship is impeccable. There’s a
classical restraint to the steady, crisply blocked stillness of the shots. It
has throwback appeal in the patient setup and slow reveal of one clue after
another. Based on a 1992 novel by crime fiction legend Lawrence Block, the film
finds pleasures in the investigation, watching Detective Matthew Scudder think
things through. Once a cop, he was in a bad incident resulting in the death of
a little girl. Since then, he’s been haunted by that moment, eking out a living
as an unlicensed private investigator. As the movie begins, he’s asked to find
a kidnapper who snatched a drug trafficker’s wife, got ransom money, then
killed her anyway.
Scudder, Block’s most famous creation, having appeared in 18
books since 1976, is here played by Liam Neeson, no stranger to the role of a
calm, grieving, professional man of violence. He’s right for this kind of part
because he’s so confident. We believe in his skill. We can see intelligence and
thought in his eyes, the moral gravity of the situation resting on his broad
shoulders. As he’s aged, Neeson has grown not restrained, but minimalist. He
can suggest so much with a layer of gravel in his voice, a small shift of
eyebrows, a tilt of the head. He’s still, solid, softly deploying his deep
intonations until they calcify with deadly seriousness as he addresses bad men.
He towers over others in a scene, and yet exudes a beguiling mixture of
intimidating warmth, fierce intelligence and refreshing compassion equally
sparingly deployed.
He’s reason enough to see the film. We watch as the gears
turn in his head. He meets with the trafficker (Dan Stevens) and his brother
(Boyd Holbrook), talks with witnesses, does research in the library (the film’s
set in 1999), and casually scopes out crime scenes. Eventually, he’s paired with
a sweet homeless teenager (Brian “Astro” Bradley) who loves Sam Spade and
Phillip Marlowe as much as this film does. The kid likes the idea of being a
private eye. The relationship he slowly develops with a reluctant Neeson isn’t
cloying or sentimental, but positioned as a nice dim light in an otherwise grim
experience.
Violence is brutal, sudden, and graphic in impact and
implication, if not always shown. On occasion, Frank cuts to the depraved kidnapper
(a pair of them, actually, played by David Harbour and Adam David Thompson) in
flashbacks to prior murders and in present tense stalking of new targets. It’s unpleasant
and unsettling, a grey mood of unrelenting menace. The ensemble is exclusively
male, women left to be only objectified, wounded, imperiled, and chopped up
into little pieces. We feel the weight of this danger, and as the stakes are
raised it gets unrelentingly tense. Frank is certainly serious about the way he
approaches this violence. It’s not a lark. It hurts. But the speaking parts are
so fully ensconced in a masculine world, it’s more than a little disquieting to
realize every female presence is only meat for the plot’s grinding.
But Neeson is so good, and the procedural mystery aspects so
skillfully deployed, it manages to work despite this nagging imbalance. It’s
compelling, the kind of tough, darkly effective detective movie we don’t often
get these days. The film serves up all the usual red herrings and revelations
you’d hope for. Frank’s script is terse and smartly plotted, playing fair by
the various developments and actions. All the while, Neeson anchors the
proceedings with his intense and welcome seriousness, as well as his dry humor
and desire to keep his demons at bay. His humble struggle against the evil that
men do is the lurid hook, but the throughline of his Alcoholics Anonymous
meetings, threaded throughout, including a monologue intercut with the climax,
makes it matter. He gives a complicated, soulful genre performance as much a
throwback to detective stories of yore as the plotting.
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