We Own the Night
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Robert Duvall
Director: James Gray
The film: The selection of We Own the Night as a competition entry remains one of the major mysteries of last year's Cannes Film Festival. After all, it was just a few months after Martin Scorsese's The Departed had taken the Academy Awards by storm, and one would expect audiences for police thrillers with family feuds and double dealings to have reached saturation point.
Unsurprisingly, James Gray's film was probably the least talked-about work to have emerged from the Croisette. Call it bad timing: Gray worked on his film longer than Scorsese did (the 38-year-old New Yorker's last effort, The Yards, was released in 2000) and We Own the Night isn't bad, either. It elicited a more consistent round of performances from its cast than The Departed, and is a more subtle, stylish film. Its characters are nuanced and believable, even if the plot is less so.
Set in New York in 1988, when the pre-Giuliani Big Apple was at its lawless nadir, the story is an unflinching look at honorable cops trying to close in on a murderous clan of Russian drug-traffickers. On the side of the law is deputy police chief Burt Gruzinsky (Robert Duvall) and his eldest son Joe (Mark Wahlberg), a rising star in the NYPD and its newly-appointed head narc; on the other is Vadim (Alex Veadov), a brutal thug trying to bring in one of the biggest shipments of hard drugs the city has ever seen.