Subject: Fw: NYT and LAT
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From: James Lewis <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:37:30 
To: Oren Moverman ([email-masked])<[email-masked]>
Subject: NYT and LAT

NYT on top, LA Times at the bottom

November 22, 2011
Movie Review | 'Rampart'
The Mysterious Mind of a Cop Who Goes Bad
By MANOHLA DARGIS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/manohla_dargis/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

A sun-scorched noir, “Rampart”<http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/327201/Rampart/overview> tells a familiar story with such visual punch and hustling energy that it comes close to feeling like a new kind of movie, though it’s more just a tough gloss on American crime stories past. Directed by Oren Moverman<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/272332/Oren-Moverman?inline=nyt-per> from a fast, nasty, at times queasily funny screenplay by him and James Ellroy, it stars Woody Harrelson<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/30548/Woody-Harrelson?inline=nyt-per> as Dave Brown, one of those dirty cops who ooze out of the smog-kissed Los Angeles sprawl to keep the peace in paradise, usually by breaking heads and gunning for trouble.

If you’ve read Mr. Ellroy, whose crime novels include “L.A. Confidential,”<http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/154997/L-A-Confidential/overview> or one of his influences, Joseph Wambaugh<http://www.josephwambaugh.net/> (“The Choirboys”<http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/9425/The-Choirboys/overview>), you will recognize Dave Brown, the bullheaded, red-necked cop who swings first, asks later and calls the city a jungle and himself one of its soldiers. The language is no accident: For decades the Los Angeles Police Department followed a military model that made it a paradigm of ruthless efficiency in which police violence, particularly against minorities, was tolerated. By 1999, the year the movie opens, the department was rocking from the revelation that cops in the anti-gang unit in the Rampart Division, in central Los Angeles, had been dealing drugs and worse.

“Rampart” isn’t a docudrama take on the scandal, which is mentioned in passing, but a fictional, sometimes surrealistic exploration of the kind of mindset or maybe ideology, personal and professional, that led some Los Angeles cops to rob, kill and turn into a gang of their own. It’s a vivid, often mesmerizing portrait of a man rotting from the inside out, though perhaps only partly because the organization he works for (though really against), and the world he inhabits, are sick too. Yet why Dave does what he does is anyone’s guess, because one of the movie’s strengths is that it finds meaning in his actions without trying to explain him. Some people, it suggests, remain mysteries, which, however maddening, also helps make Dave insistently watchable.

He’s hard to miss. Mr. Moverman, working in digital and with the great cinematographer Bobby Bukowski<http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/behind-the-lens-bobby-bukowski-cinematographer>, keeps something of a visual chokehold on Dave right from the start. The movie opens with a series of jump cuts that show Mr. Harrelson in profile in extreme close-up, his face filling the left third of the screen. There’s something totemic about this face, which stands out sharply against the colorful, meaningfully blurred background. Dave may be patrolling the city, listening to the radio, smoking a cigarette, but the neighborhoods under his watch are nothing but blots of color and light. You can’t see the people he’s passing, and it becomes evident — as when he drives into a crowd, scattering it with a raucous laugh — that neither does he.

As in classic art cinema, character psychology is all (or a lot of it, anyway). There isn’t a strong story tethering Dave, one of those heists or rackets of generic cop stories, but instead a succession of crises, most with no obvious solution. He’s in a relationship with not one woman but two, Barbara (Cynthia Nixon<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/52802/Cynthia-Nixon?inline=nyt-per>) and Catherine (Anne Heche<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/31463/Anne-Heche?inline=nyt-per>), sisters with whom he has daughters. The families live in adjacent houses that Dave wanders in and out of, much as he seems to do in their lives. Mostly he flops in front of the TV, though he also comically pleads for one of the women (both ex-wives) to sleep with him.

Dave’s graver troubles ignite after he’s caught on video beating a suspect nearly to death. The episode turns up the heat in an already simmering city. Protesters start massing outside Dave’s station, Rampart, and politicians and the district attorney’s office (whose numbers include an excellent Sigourney Weaver<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/75144/Sigourney-Weaver?inline=nyt-per>) start circling.

One night Dave picks up a lawyer, a beauty with defeated eyes, Linda (Robin Wright, perfect), who he grows to suspect has it in for him, though it’s his old friend, a crooked ex-cop, Hartshorn (a wonderful Ned Beatty<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/4810/Ned-Beatty?inline=nyt-per>), who may be the bigger worry. As things go from bad to worse, the sweat on Dave’s face turns into a river, the visuals grow progressively baroque, all the women move farther away, and the walls close in like the grave.

A few years ago Mr. Moverman made a splash with “The Messenger<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tTIQ8pkGf0>,” his well-received directing debut about two soldiers, played by Mr. Harrelson and Ben Foster<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/530857/Ben-Foster?inline=nyt-per>, who bring the news of the dead back home. (Mr. Foster has a small role in “Rampart” as a homeless man and served as one of the movie’s producers.) It was already clear that Mr. Moverman knew how to let actors go deep, so it’s no surprise that the performers in his new movie are uniformly very good and often better than that, starting with Mr. Harrelson, who brings both a raw intensity and a necessary lightness of touch to his unsentimental performance. His Dave is a monster in many ways, but brutally human to the end.

“Rampart” is rated R (Under 17 requires parent or adult guardian). Bad behavior in the extreme, and toe sucking.

RAMPART

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Directed by Oren Moverman<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/272332/Oren-Moverman?inline=nyt-per>; written by James Ellroy and Mr. Moverman; director of photography, Bobby Bukowski; edited by Jay Rabinowitz; music by Dickon Hinchliffe; production design by David Wasco; costumes by Catherine George; produced by Lawrence Inglee, Clark Peterson, Ben Foster<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/530857/Ben-Foster?inline=nyt-per> and Ken Kao; released by Millennium Entertainment. At the Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema, 139-143 East Houston Street, East Village. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes.

WITH: Woody Harrelson<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/30548/Woody-Harrelson?inline=nyt-per> (Dave Brown), Robin Wright (Linda Fentress), Sigourney Weaver<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/75144/Sigourney-Weaver?inline=nyt-per> (Joan Confrey), Ice Cube (Kyle Timkins), Ned Beatty<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/4810/Ned-Beatty?inline=nyt-per> (Hartshorn), Steve Buscemi (Bill Blago), Cynthia Nixon<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/52802/Cynthia-Nixon?inline=nyt-per> (Barbara), Anne Heche<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/31463/Anne-Heche?inline=nyt-per> (Catherine), Brie Larson (Helen), Sammy Boyarsky (Margaret) and Ben Foster (General Terry).

James Lewis

Publicity

310 893 6289 ext. 192

Millennium Entertainment

[email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>

www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-rampart-20111123,0,6183474.story<http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-rampart-20111123,0,6183474.story>

latimes.com
Movie review: 'Rampart'
Woody Harrelson shines playing a rogue cop in 'Rampart,' set in 1999 Los Angeles.

By Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times Film Critic

November 23, 2011

Playing a cop at his worst, his hands never dirtier, the stakes never higher, Woody Harrelson has perhaps never been better than he is in the seamy, scandalous jumbled rumble of "Rampart."

Set in Los Angeles in 1999, the film captures a time when public trust in law enforcement was brought down by the exposure of police corruption in the Rampart precinct. Rather than take on the widespread
malfeasance, director OrenMoverman, sharing writing credit with crime novelist James Ellroy, constructed a story around one very bad cop running rampant in Rampart.

As it happens, Officer Dave Brown (Harrelson) is a world of trouble on his own. Like the proverbial onion, he has layers of internal rot, the result of bending the rules, and not just at work. He's got two ex-wives (Anne Heche and Cynthia Nixon), sisters — and he cheated on both — with a daughter from each marriage. All of that conflict is housed under one roof along with what's left of his moral compass.

But the film starts with his other home — the beat. Trussed up in his perfectly pressed uniform, the sun glaring off his midnight-black aviators, Dave scopes out the gang-riddled streets he patrols. You start to get a sense of his twisted worldview as he lectures the younger cops. But clarity comes with the first arrest, Dave muscling a confession out of a convenience store thief. Not long after, he's caught on tape beating a guy nearly to death Rodney King-style. It's still playing a continuous loop on TV when he's involved in a hinky shooting.

In very short order, Date-Rape Dave, as he's called for the date rape suspect he eliminated under suspicious circumstances, is in hot water with the already embattled department, looking at sanctions, maybe a forced retirement. Watching Dave try to fast-talk his way around an assistant dis-

trict attorney (Sigourney Weaver), quoting the law like scripture, provides a little comic relief, along with the realization that the problem for higher-ups isn't so much what he's done but the public embarrassment he's become by getting caught.

Before they are finished, the filmmakers have given Dave all the tribulations of Job, none of the godliness and very little hope of the redemption. Whereas Ellroy is fascinated by the sick twist of crime, Moverman seems to be drawn to tortured souls, as we saw in his directing debut, the soldier's story of 2009's "The Messenger." It drew notice for its authenticity and an Oscar nomination for Harrelson as a vet trying to remain unmoved by the death notices he's charged with delivering.

In "Rampart," Harrelson has to leave all decency behind. It is a credit to the actor that you feel anything — much less compassion — for a man his older daughter (Brie Larson, even more rebellious and embittered than she is in "United States of Tara") describes as homophobic, chauvinistic, racist and violent.

Dave's crimes against humanity — criminals, kids, exes, lovers and others — are made more visceral by veteran director of photography Bobby Bukowski's ("Ethan Frome," "The Messenger") use of a hand-held camera and mostly natural light. Everything looks raw.

For all of its punishing pathos, the movie does not have the clean lines and elegance of another cut at crime in this city, "L.A. Confidential" (based on an Ellroy novel). As the day of reckoning approaches, the film spins out of control, careening between convoluted subplots, with the emotional pitch of the piece swinging too wildly.

Amid the debris, there are some gems to be found. Robin Wright as the wrung-out and strung-out defense attorney Dave meets in a bar, matches his cynicism and his sexual need beat for beat. Ned Beatty as the retired cop who's been covering for Dave for years, handles his own black soul with such evil grace it's chilling. But the film is really Harrelson's calling card — if there was any doubt — proof that the goofy bartender of "Cheers" has turned into a natural born killer on-screen.

James Lewis

Publicity

310 893 6289 ext. 192

Millennium Entertainment

[email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>