I'll tell you one thing about Guillame
Canet's 'Blood Ties'… damn this movie looks good. I'm
not talking 'slick' good or 'clean print' good but 1970's
good. Everything about this production feels like this
was a movie that was actually shot in the 1970's. The
clothes, the cars, the furniture, the curtains, to even the
somewhat yellowed washed out print… if nothing else, 'Blood
Ties' was brutally authentic. Clive Owens holding on to
his Brooklyn accent… not so much. But that aside, 'Blood
Ties' was so meticulous in its setting and presentation, and
so effective in placing me in that time, that its missteps
were easy enough for me to look past.
Billy Crudup is New York Police Detective Frank Pierzynski, a
man who seems, at best, socially maladjusted. The source
of Frank's disposition could very well be his older brother
Chris (Owen) who is getting released from prison on furlough
today, and while his sister Marie (Lili Taylor) seems
overjoyed to see her brother… Frank looks uncomfortable.
But then Frank looks uncomfortable pretty much all of the
time. We should probably mention that this film opened
with Frank leading a big bust that went all to hell, and it
wasn't lost on Frank's boss that he seemed to know the
girlfriend, Vanessa (Zoe Saldana), of the guy these cops just
performed a major offensive on and busted for the major crime
of having an unregistered firearm.
But to Frank's benefit, despite the fact he's following this
woman around everywhere she goes, which probably wouldn't
become against the law for another fifteen years, Frank does
try to do right by his brother by allowing him to move in with
him, despite the objections of the aforementioned boss, and he
also found Chris a job.
Here's the thing… Chris wants to do right… he
really does… but 'do right' and 'Chris' are two words that
just don't get along. Eventually Chris has to go back to
doing what he knows how to do, and that flies diametrically
against the thing that Frank knows how to do, which as you
might imagine will cause all kinds of conflict between the two
brothers, with this conflict coming to a head on a sparse New
York street during an armored truck robbery.
Frank knows he has to let Chris go, which is just as well
since Chris has gone and completely immersed himself into his
old lifestyle, running a whorehouse run by his drug addict
ex-wife Monica (Marion Cotillard), all in service to help care
for his new pregnant wife Natalie (Mila Kunis). Frank
for his part has had enough of the NYPD scrutinizing him, is
about to call it, besides, he's managed to stalk Vanessa into
falling in love with him. This technique has yet to work
for me.
Problem is Vanessa kind of already had a boyfriend, and he's
kind of out of jail, and he's very unhappy. Chris,
admittedly, hasn't done much right by Frank, but at the end of
the day, family must always stick together, no matter what the
consequences.
There are some issues plaguing Guilliame Canet's period piece
'Blood Ties', this we cannot deny. There are times when
it moves far too slowly, there are moments the narrative bends
under the weight of its own clunky dialog, at no point where
we ever able to wrap my brain around the relationship between
Frank and Vanessa, finding it completely illogical, more so
from Vanessa's point of view since I couldn't completely
understand why she was with Frank in the first place.
And Clive Owen's steely blue-eyed glare can only go so
far. We love Clive Owen here at the FCU, but considering
his wavering accent and the fact that he spent a good bit of
this movie side by side with his best friend Mike, played by a
legitimate New Yorker in Dominic Lombardazzo, only exacerbated
the fact that this is was a guy from England playing a New
Yorker.
Yes, there are issues, but we still liked the movie because
the movie just felt so good. It looked good, it sounded
good, it smelled good… seriously, I could literally smell the
Pizza and the sausage in the cannoli. No joke.
Obviously, a movie that just looks good doesn't make, all by
itself, for an entertaining film but over the course of the
film I was able to get involved into the story that Canet was
telling me. Yes, that accent Clive Owens affected tended
to be oft-putting, but the actual character of Chris worked
for me. The path he took from his attempts to do right,
to the self-realization that a life of crime was his
unavoidable destiny played out very well on the screen.
While Frank was a more difficult to character to get a feel
for, to the point that he was far too difficult to root for
despite Billy Crudup's solid performance, what was easy to get
behind was the complex relationship between these two
brothers. This is essentially what the movie revolves
around, and in that sense 'Blood Ties' was a complete
success.
So while there are a few roadblocks on our way to praising
'Blood Ties', it is dead on accurate with the big
things. And it does look good doing it.
