'Night' is murky at best

By Michael Sragow | Sun Movie Critic

October 12, 2007

(C-) Writer-director James Gray sets We Own the Night in 1988. The title comes from the late-'80s motto of the NYPD's street- crimes unit, and a key location is a garish dance club where coke flows like Coke.

But at heart, Gray wants to make the best American movie of 1958. This hoary melodrama about father and son New York City policemen (Robert Duvall and Mark Wahlberg) and the black-sheep, club-manager brother (Joaquin Phoenix) who helps them defeat the Russian mob is a throwback to the time when New York-based directors, bred on live TV, weren't shy or all that skillful about mixing moral earnestness with urban grit and method-acting anguish. Gray says he went to school on William Friedkin's French Connection (1971). He's actually created something weirder and (alas) far lousier.

In We Own the Night, between spasmodic showdowns and cathartic violence, Gray relishes but never illuminates the psychological mess of one son (Wahlberg) who tries too hard to fill his father's work shoes and another (Phoenix) who has gone screaming in the other direction, partying all along the way.

These actors must love Gray: Phoenix and Wahlberg co-produced the movie. But he doesn't repay them with decent lines or fresh situations (the climax is a howler), and he trivializes the character of Phoenix's Puerto Rican girlfriend, played by the game and luscious Eva Mendes. (The family's own ethnic background is murky: Duvall and Wahlberg go by Grusinsky while Phoenix goes by his mother's last name, Green. Is this meant to mirror the movie's slimiest bad guy, who wears a cross and a Star of David?)

The plotting is so rickety that the action hinges on suspicions roused by a character carrying a cigarette lighter and matches. Is that more rare or suspect than a man wearing a belt and suspenders?

One shot gave me a laugh: a pile of furs on a couch at the home of the Russian Mr. Big. And one sequence gave me a jolt: a car-chase staged in the rain. (Gray added the drops digitally.)

But even through a rain-splashed windshield you can see the resolution of the crime story and the family conflicts coming a mile away. We Own the Night disproves the idea that everything old becomes new again. Some antiques, apparently, just get downright rank.

>>>We Own the Night (Sony) Starring Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix. Directed by James Gray. Rated R. Time 117 minutes.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com