Cynical Cinema

Cleaner, starring Samuel L. Jackson, is the kind of movie you get when producers look at all the other movies and TV shows that have been made in the past year, and try to make one just like that.  But with a new idea that will make this movie seem different!  And they’ve already done the spy thing, they’ve done the cop-on-the-edge thing, they’ve done the Negotiator (also with Jackson), and they’ve done every combination and permutation of the characters from CSI and Bones and Cold Case and Medium and every other cop-related profession.  But wait - we have never done a movie about the guy who cleans up the blood after murders!  This is so NEW!  Oh, it doesn’t matter that it’s the exact same story we’ve used in every movie and TV show over the past ten years, this character is new.  He cleans up blood!  Get it?

So you get a movie about a murder, and a guy trying to solve it, and police corruption and extramarital affairs and betrayal and father-daughter relationships and blah blah blah, ground up in the meat grinder of every script ever written, and spit out into this movie with the fresh new character idea.  And we have Samuel L. Jackson as the guy who comes by after cops are done their investigations and cleans up the blood and gross stuff at murder scenes.  This, really has almost nothing to do with the rest of the movie.  It just gives the film a title and a new, fresh main character who is still a cop and still solves crimes but isn’t the same.  And next thing you know, he gets caught up in a web of intrigue that involves a mysterious hot chick (Eva Mendes) and his former best friend and cop-buddy (Ed Harris).  Be warned - the next bits here contain spoilers!

In watching Cleaner, I discovered a few bothersome things.  First of all, one of my favourite actors, Ed Harris, has somehow become a bit of a caricature.  I was sad when Harris showed up, as Jackson’s best friend, and I thought - oh, no!  You can’t trust Ed Harris!  Think of Gone Baby Gone, A History of Violence, and now this!  I knew it the second he stepped onto the screen.  Ed Harris is just too big an actor to play second-banana, the hero’s best friend.  If he’s in there as something other than the star, he’s the surprise hero cop, or the bad guy.  That’s it.  And then Eva Mendes shows up.  And I’m thinking  - oh no!  Don’t trust Eva Mendes either!  She just looks like a vamp who will screw you over.  And then there’s Luis Guzman, who I really like.  He seems untrustworthy, which likely means that by the end he will be a good guy, and an ally to our hero.  And lo and behold, all of these assumptions turned out to be true!  This is either because these actors are now typecast, or because the director somehow telegraphed the ending.

 And I believe that the latter is true.  The direction in this movie, by Renny Harlin, is clumsy at best.  Harlin, I would argue, has never directed a good movie in his career.  His previous best was The Long Kiss Goodnight, also with Samuel L. Jackson, and it was average at best.  Too often he seems to try to add a small twist to existing plots and cliched scripts, and ends up making boring film.  And Cleaner is no exception.  The clumsiness is most apparent in the relationship between Jackson and his daughter, played very ably by Keke Palmer.  But the best acting in the world couldn’t save Cleaner from the clumsy, awkward, obvious and irritating moments between the two.  Their relationship swings wildly from that father-daughter sharing-everything warm and fuzzy one to the absentee-father-who-lets-his-work-dominate-his-home-life one.  Sometimes within the same scene!  And the latter relationship culminates in that oh-so-obnoxious cliche, him MISSING HER SOCCER GAME!  I HATE the parent-missing-the-child’s-soccer-game cliche. 

And the other, close-bond father-daughter relationship culminates with another horrible cliche that I hate.  The daughter, having to choose between her distant father and the trusted family friend who all of a sudden can’t be trusted, chooses to shoot the formerly trusted family friend.  I hate this ending.  It hasn’t been original or interesting since the third time it was used, in 1923.  Oh, come on.  Just an example of the powerfully unoriginal, clumsily constructed movie that is the Cleaner.  It is so neatly wrapped up in a tidy little package at the end that it looks really stupid.  This movie really needed to be far rougher around the edges to even keep my attention for more than half the film.  Avoid this, it sucks.

Until now, I was convinced that Ben Affleck wouldn’t know a good script if it walked up to him and kicked him in the stones. Now, I am not so sure. Either he just doesn’t care, as long as he’s acting, or he is such a bad actor that he will ruin any script by himself. But there is a third option. Perhaps the script to Gone Baby Gone not only walked up to him and kicked him in the stones, it also bit him in the face, chewed off part of his nose, ripped out his nipple ring, stabbed him twice and then gave him the people’s elbow. Or maybe it’s a combination, because Ben Affleck’s wisest decision as a director in Gone Baby Gone was not to cast Ben Affleck in any role in his movie. How many directors can competently direct themselves? Clint Eastwood and…yeah. Maybe just Clint. So that was good decision number one. A questionable decision was to cast his younger brother Casey in the starring role. Casey Affleck, as far as I was aware, existed only in movies that starred Ben, and even then he played some minor throw-away role. How good could he actually be?

Well, the answer, it turns out, is VERY good. Casey Affleck plays a private investigator who looks as though he is thirteen. This is great casting, because Casey Affleck does indeed look as though he is thirteen. And when the situation calls for him to act the tough guy, it somehow really works. Not only do we not expect it, neither do the bad guys. And it’s pretty convincing intimidation when this young, babyfaced guy all of a sudden gets Dirty Harry tough. Everyone is taken aback, realiztically so. It’s a great job by Affleck of handling the character. Somehow, with that Good Will Hunting Boston accent, you get the sense that this guy is a lot tougher than he looks. His wife is played admirably by Michelle Monaghan, an actress who is rising to the top of the heap of late with roles in movies like this one and North Country. The best performance in the movie, however, is turned in by Amy Ryan, who plays the mother of an abducted little girl. She is a coke-head, a drug mule, a drunk, in short, one of the worst mothers imaginable for a sweet young child.

Affleck and Monaghan are hired by the little girl’s aunt to help find her. They are joined in their pursuit by a pair of cops, played by the excellent Ed Harris and John Ashton, and their search takes them through the seedy underbelly of Boston, dealing with drug dealers (some good and some bad) and general thugs who cause problems at every turn. Every time the movie seems to be reaching a certain conclusion, the script throws a twist into the plot, and all of a sudden Affleck and Monaghan are careening toward a different outcome. By the end of the film, the whole story becomes clear, and there is a final “showdown” that presents a Sophie’s Choice kind of ending, although not nearly so dramatic. This is the only minor quibble I have with the ending. The decision reached by the characters, the course of action they choose to take, seems like a massive moral decision that would cause most of us to really wonder what we would do in that situation. But a closer examination of that choice makes it seem obvious that there is really only one choice that could be made there, the choice Affleck eventually does make. I won’t tell you the details, I haven’t really revealed anything here, but you’ll have to watch the movie yourself. It is being released by Alliance Atlantis on Tuesday, and really needs to be watched to be understood. Watch this movie.