After earning an Oscar nomination for his electrifying 2012 feature The Drop. Written by Dennis Lehane (“Shutter Island”, “Gone Baby Gone”), adapting his own short story, this amounts to his first feature screenplay after short stints writing for television (“Boardwalk Empire” and “The Wire”) and seeing several of his novels previously adapted. Add a cast that includes Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, James Gandolfini and Matthias Schoenaerts to the mix and you have the potential for greatness, to which this film strives. With a classical sense of story-telling and character building, The Drop allows this wealth of talent to thrive and create lasting characters.
I often sing the praises of Tom Hardy and I have to once again as he is one of the few versatile, big name actors working today. He’s an actor unafraid of taking on challenging roles or at least roles different from those he’s tackled previously. Earlier this year he played a Welsh construction foreman in Steven Knight‘s wonderful picture Locke and now he’s a bartender in a Brooklyn bar and he never misses a beat.
Quiet and reserved, Hardy plays Bob Saginowski, tending bar for his cousin Marv (Gandolfini), or, more specifically, the Chechens that purchased the bar and now use it as one of their money drops. Bob is incredibly unassuming. Is he a bit dumb? Is he smarter than he lets on? The story behind the eyes is a difficult one to read and it goes to the heart of The Drop as he’s clearly aware he’s working in a shady business and yet doesn’t see himself as one of “them” as he says. He’s a fascinating character whose words seem to be carefully selected and when he speaks he never gives too much away.
Bob’s story eventually coincides with Nadia (Rapace) when he hears whimpering coming from one of the trash cans outside her house. He looks and finds a pit bull puppy, beaten and bloodied. “That’s not good”, he says before ultimately deciding to take the puppy in, a decision that also results in the start of a friendship between him and Nadia, a concept that seems almost entirely foreign to Bob who lives a life of relative seclusion and loneliness — “I’m just a bartender”. As much as you may not expect it, this is the story The Drop largely hinges on. It’s this focus on character that makes the criminal aspects that come a little later in the story work so well.
Lehane’s screenplay excels in slow-playing the action. It’s classical in its approach to character development rather than thinking it needs to hit certain formulaic beats to keep the audience interested. The narrative rewards your patience and investment in these characters and while that might not suit the attention span of today’s audiences, those that do show a little restraint and ability to sit and pay attention for 90 minutes will be rewarded with an outstanding final fifteen and the delivery of one specific line from Hardy that had my audience howling and clapping with approval.
It’s these final fifteen minutes that I can’t get out of my head. Hardy is the star, of course, channeling a little bit of classic Robert De Niro while Rapace gives one of the better performances I’ve seen from her, including some reaction shots in the latter minutes that help sell the emotional weight of the scene without words, but instead with actual acting.
I also couldn’t help experiencing a moment of sadness, seeing Gandolfini on the big screen for what will be the final time and he’s great. But is that any kind of a surprise? In actuality it goes to show just how reliable he was all along, something we may have taken for granted. That said, if I were to express any issues I had with the film it would be the lack of information concerning his character. Lehane’s script certainly touches upon minor aspects of who Marv is and, more importantly, was, but the questions that remain would have actually enriched the character and film had they been addressed just a little more specifically. I’m a fan of subtlety, but in this case it’s not so much subtle as it is lacking.
Taking that into consideration, I’ll take this small omission of character every time if the end result is a film that cares this much about building a story rather than rushing to get the plot out in front of the audience for fear they’ll get bored.
By the film’s end you realize just how much has been unpacked. You can see what Roskam and Lehane were doing all the way through and you can look back to Hardy’s performance and recognize all he did to build his character. Just as we are getting to know Bob, so is Nadia and as much as we are told about certain characters, it’s what we’re not told about Bob that keeps this story electric, especially the more we find out. That, to me, is the kind of movie I want to see.
