Metro Pulse/The Yards

Movie Guru Rating:
Enlightening (4 out of 5)

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The Yards stays true to its complicated characters

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

Ah, moral complexity. It's the stuff of life. (And of presidential elections too, but that's not the point of this particular column.)

It's also the foundation of all great drama. Think Oedipus Rex. Think Hamlet. Think Moby Dick. There's not a one of them that has what you'd exactly call "good guys" and "bad guys." They're full of humans acting like humans, doing things out of some mixture of self-interest, principle and transcendental longing that can't be easily distilled to component parts.

Of course, moral complexity doesn't always make for laugh riots or heartwarming homilies. It's challenging and often uncomfortable and, well, complex. Which is why Hollywood tends to avoid the stuff like kryptonite. The masses don't want to be challenged or made uncomfortable, the thinking goes; they want entertainment, pacification, reassurance. They want The Grinch. Or Arnold Schwarzenegger. They don't want something like The Yards.

It's probably true. I notice that Charlie's Angels is currently playing on seven screens in Knoxville while The Yards is showing on exactly one. And at the Sunday evening show I attended, there were three people in the theater. Two of them left before it was over.

So, whatever. The point is that The Yards is a pretty good piece of moviemaking, tough and nuanced and a lot smarter than it seems at first. It's not quite in the class of the movies it emulates, the gritty American dramas of the 1970s that made you feel like you'd never seen the real world on screen before (the cast even includes '70s icons James Caan, Faye Dunaway, and Ellen Burstyn), but it makes a good stab at it.

A stab is the catalyst of the plot, actually—a thrust with a switchblade that kills a railyard guard and destabilizes the lives of a host of characters, guilty and innocent alike. The story is about how a thing like this happens, what it means, and how easily personal loyalties and jealousies override whatever we call morality. (In that sense, if in no other, it reminded me of Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter.)

The Yards begins with a young mook named Leo (Mark Wahlberg) getting out of prison after serving time for auto theft. His mother (Burstyn) has planned a welcome-home party at their small apartment in Queens. Among the guests are Leo's best friend Willie (Joaquin Phoenix); Leo's cousin Erica (Charlize Theron), who's also Willie's girlfriend; and Erica's mother Kitty (Dunaway), whose new husband Frank owns a large railcar repair company where Willie and his friends work.

Leo doesn't seem like a bad guy. He loves his mother, and when he tells her he's going to go straight and do good, he means it. But when he goes to see Frank (Caan) about a job, Frank tells him to go to school and learn a trade. Leo's anxious to start paying his way, though, and Willie—who's indebted to Leo for not ratting him out in their past adventures—lets him tag along on his errands for Frank.

As it turns out, despite Willie's new suits and high-rolling lifestyle, he hasn't strayed far from the streets. He and his buddies are in charge of securing subway and train contracts from the city, which involves all sorts of petty graft and kickbacks. It also involves sabotaging the work of Frank's competitors, by vandalizing freshly repaired cars.

Leo's unsure at first, but he goes along. Even his mother thinks Frank's a good guy, so this seems like legitimate work. But then, of course, something goes wrong, somebody dies, and after less than a week out of jail, Leo's on the run.

From there, The Yards could go a lot of different directions. It could turn into a bloodbath, as it threatens to do at various points. It could become just another chase movie, with Leo dodging cops and gangsters, and all moral considerations thrown out the window. It could go the Charles Bronson revenge fantasy route. But writer-director James Gray (whose own father was involved in a Queens racketeering scandal in the 1980s) doesn't settle for any of those. This is a movie that takes into consideration everything from the ambiguous bonds between cousins, step-children and step-parents, and best friends to the effects of minority set-asides on government contractors.

Time and again, Gray resists the broad strokes that usually define big-screen drama. He's sympathetic in varying degrees to all of his characters. And he gets a lot of help from a good cast. It would be easy to joke about former Calvin Klein models Wahlberg and Phoenix appearing together, but they're both compelling and effortless in their roles. That's not a surprise from the edgy Phoenix, but Wahlberg shows more subtlety here than he has before. And he has an affinity for blue-collar characters that makes him one of Hollywood's few working class heroes.

Likewise, Charlize Theron gets a chance to act for a change, and she aces it. Erica is the movie's conscience, a tough girl who wants to believe in things she suspects aren't true. (You can currently see her in more customary eye-candy roles in The Legend of Bagger Vance and Men of Honor.) And Caan, as Frank, is a perfectly formed character, a man who has to reconcile the way he thinks of himself—as a straight-up guy—with the things he has to do to survive. When a political thug suggests a violent course of action at one point, Frank responds in disgust, "What do you think I am?" You can tell he's not sure of the answer himself.

In the end, the film takes one too many Shakespearean turns, pushing into the realm of Grand Tragedy where irony would have sufficed. But Gray mostly performs a neat balancing act of characters, motives, and consequences. Hey, in Hollywood, that and a buck-fifty will get you a cup of coffee.