We Own the Night
James Gray is superb at creating atmosphere. “We Own the Night” takes its title from the New York Police Department vice squad’s motto in the 1980s, and it begins with a collection of period photographs that efficiently establish the milieu. We are at the height of the cocaine-fueled club scene. Beyond the last days of disco, the nightlife is more buttoned-down but no less hedonistic, and the mustachioed urban cowboys in blue are out to make their mark. Gray is also an assured chronicler of the ethnic enclaves of New York’s outer boroughs; he writes conflict between relatives with the ease of someone who grew up with his ear to the door as the adults in his life discussed sensitive topics in hushed tones. (People tend to whisper in Gray’s movies.)
But unlike “The Yards,” Gray’s previous collaboration with actors Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix, “We Own the Night” never erupts dramatically. It’s also remarkably square, given the environment Gray so meticulously creates. He’s out to tell a story of a black sheep’s redemption, and he does so stolidly. Bobby Green (Phoenix) makes his living as a nightclub manager, but Gray never sells the lure or the fun of Green’s line of work, even when he contrasts it to the municipal drabness — again, the milieu is spot-on — of the family occupation, police work. Green is Bobby’s mother’s maiden name — he changed it from Grusinski. Gray nails the tension this causes in an emotionally charged early scene where Bobby attends an event honoring the promotion of his brother, Joe (Wahlberg), to captain. Joe and dad Bert (Robert Duvall), a deputy chief, lecture Bobby as he sits in a church pew, and Bobby, who had to smoke weed before he could bring himself to enter the event, can’t hide his contempt.
From here, the movie trudges along relatively predictably, tracking Bobby’s return to his family’s good graces. A surprising, violent twist mostly just causes the brother-vs.-brother conflict to fizzle. Revelations about the drug dealing out of Bobby’s club don’t carry the heft they should. Gray’s commitment to subtlety sometimes gets the better of him, and he builds little tension. A few extraordinary action sequences — a drug raid with Bobby wearing a wire, a hallucinatory car chase in the rain, a climactic cat-and-mouse game in a reedy Brooklyn marsh — seem to come out of nowhere, disconnected from the rest of the movie. Gray has no idea what to do with Eva Mendes, who has a few amusing early scenes as Bobby’s sweet, party-loving girlfriend, Amada. He doesn’t see her as anything more than nightclub arm candy, and when Amada is forced to accompany Bobby into witness protection, she becomes an irrelevant, morose cutaway. Eventually she just disappears.
It’s a shame Gray botches “We Own the Night,” which vanished quickly from theaters this fall: The raw material was all there, and his work around the periphery is spot-on. But he never shapes the story into anything engaging.