DVD Review: What Doesn't Kill You (2008)

Brian Goodman's Compelling True Story:
What Doesn't Kill You
...Makes You Stronger On Blu-ray & DVD 4/28/09

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Usually when you see, “the following is based on a true story,” you’re expecting a sports movie about a ragtag team of ambitious underachievers fighting to beat out the big, bad, better-funded school comprised of a student body that could be recruited as extras on TV’s Gossip Girl.

Typically, there’s an unlikely coach or mentor thrown into the mix who doesn’t seem to have what it takes or is prone to quit in the process but the underdog star player who has what it takes but doesn’t know it manages to help forge an alliance with him to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and bring home that trophy in films where even second place feels like first place.

Convicted criminal turned actor turned writer/director Brian Goodman’s debut work as a feature filmmaker-- What Doesn’t Kill You-- is thankfully not that kind of movie. While on the surface, it appears to be a South Boston crime movie-- involving a Wahlberg, handsome character actors, and a dark cinematographic color scheme very popular in our post Sopranos and post Departed world-- however, once you look closer, Goodman’s autobiographical picture hearkens back to earlier filmmaking of not just Scorsese’s ‘70s Mean Streets era that Academy Award nominee Ethan Hawke cites in the film’s production notes but even further back to the more old-fashioned realm of On the Waterfront as they also mention.

In this gritty, compelling, and highly authentic urban true-to-life crime drama nothing is glorified; you won’t hear Tony Bennett sing "Rags to Riches" over carefully edited freeze-frame footage or Rolling Stones infused hyper-cuts to help heighten the tension of the cocaine and helicopter sequence of Scorsese’s brilliant New York based GoodFellas and you definitely won’t see Vancouver filling in for South Boston to bring the budget down.

No, it's an intensely personal labor of love helmed by the man who lived it—Brian Goodman. Goodman grew up sleeping on the streets of Boston in the Dorchester neighborhood where as the notes from the Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and Yari Film Group Release explain, you either end up as a cop or a criminal.

Since you can’t exactly join the police academy as a young teen, Brian (played by Mark Ruffalo in the film) took the immediate way out and turned to a life of crime alongside his best friend Paulie (Ethan Hawke) as the two young men became a makeshift family as close as brothers yet also trying to fill in the gaps of the lack of active parenting by looking out for one another the best way they know how.

While the easily charismatic ladies man Paulie brings home a different girl every night, Brian struggles to support his two children primarily raised by his childhood sweetheart turned wife, Stacy (Something's Gotta Give, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip's Amanda Peet). After the boys align themselves with the local mobster Pat Kelly (in a turn by the real-life Brian Goodman), they find that the small percentage of profits gained by hijacking trucks and thefts that sustained them as youths aren’t quite cutting it as they grow too old for the “nickel and dime” jobs.

Therefore, they begin taking far greater risks which get exacerbated by Goodman’s reliance and addiction to hard drugs and alcohol. Facing hard jail time and an even harder life back on the outside—Brian and Paulie struggle to adapt to the outside world as they’re forced to make decisions which will forever alter their paths, relationships, and future.

At its heart, it is a character-based drama where human need, instinct and the almighty desire to “get by,” “get through,” and “survive” is what propels the characters throughout instead of pushing our fictitious "heroes" through the motions of a three act familiar paradigm. Goodman’s work, which began initially upon his post-jail sobriety in 1994 written in a tiny thirty-nine cent notebook from the local Osco Drug Store soon developed into a script that earned major support via friends who believed in both the man and material such as Boomtown's Donnie Wahlberg who met him through mutual family friends upon his release from prison.

Although Wahlberg could relate to the authenticity inherent in Goodman’s script since they grew up in the same areas (although the men had taken extraordinarily different paths) and it was Wahlberg (who also co-stars in the film) and screenwriter Paul T. Murray who assisted Goodman in polishing the screenplay to help it get the attention it deserved-- despite this, it’s ultimately Goodman’s movie. Moreover, it's Goodman's passion to bring his story to the screen that propelled the work from the idea stage to production over the course of more than a decade.

Years later, he formed another great alliance in actor Mark Ruffalo, whom Goodman met and admired while working on the set of Robert Redford’s The Last Castle. Feeling in his gut that in Ruffalo, he’d encountered someone whom he knew was instinctively a man with the right soul for the part—Ruffalo latched on immediately to the work, standing by it for more than the eight years it took to see it fully developed as the actor eventually presented the project to Ethan Hawke in person.

As Hawke recalls Ruffalo’s powerful words, he’d told Hawke who was working in a stage production, “I want to believe in a world where somebody can take themselves from prison and learn a few things, and write their own script and get it made, and direct it and have it turn out great… I want to believe in that world, so if you’re going to believe in it, you’ve got to help make it happen.”

Fortunately Hawke-- who revealed in the DVD’s nineteen minute making-of-featurette that he feels it’s exactly the kind of movie he wants to make and Ruffalo “is one of our great actors"-- felt as strongly as his colleague did and the two are completely convincing from the start as Ruffalo easily slips into the more emotional role of Brian who undergoes major shifts in values and personality throughout the approximately one hundred minute movie.

And, as a fan of Ruffalo’s since he first completely dazzled this reviewer in You Can Count On Me to the point that it was one of a handful of cinematic experiences I can vividly recall wherein you know you’re in the presence of an astounding new talent (just like Norton in Primal Fear etc.)—I must admit that for this film, I was particularly impressed by Before the Devil Knows You're Dead's Hawke who manages to shed his typical persona completely to the point where he looks and sounds like an entirely different actor.

Admittedly, par for the course and typical of the genre where female characters get lost in the shuffle, the always impressive Amanda Peet doesn’t have much with which to work in her few scenes (mostly opposite Ruffalo).

Moreover, I have to admit that structurally, you get the feeling that for the film to have completely paid off much better or compelled you in its wondrous, old-fashioned arc of a true human’s journey, Goodman should’ve spent maybe even five more minutes at the beginning delving into the humble beginnings of Brian and Paulie. While this would've help ed considerably in acquainting us with their stories as boys before they turned into young hoodlums—it’s still a remarkably riveting piece of material.

Quite brave and genuine for a first time filmmaker using his life as source material (especially when opening up about hard drugs and crime instead of home runs or touchdowns) without beating viewers over the head with a message—ultimately as Hawke notes, the essence of the film is one that is fixated on the choices we make in life. To this end, it reminds us in a way that refreshingly doesn’t preach the fact that at any time, we’re allowed to hit reset, take a different turn, say “no,” or opt to make a different decision than most would predict.

Humble, intimate, passionate, and startlingly real with commanding turns by its ensemble and main core of Hawke and Ruffalo in anchoring the production—Goodman’s intelligent piece of filmmaking shows extraordinary promise for the helmer and reminds us that despite the fact we may not be in the mood for darker tales of hardship at the box office right now, there’s still something well-earned and powerfully inspiring about both the film and the story behind the film of What Doesn’t Kill You.

Namely, it reminds us of the promise that no matter how many times we’re left for dead or counted out, we can always come back from things stronger as Brian Goodman did in the story that Wahlberg, Ruffalo, Hawke and others decided exemplified the type of world in which they wanted to live in seeing it was made for viewers to learn from and appreciate.

Righteous Kill

In Heat, they played cops and crooks.
This time around they're both cops
but have no fear — old habits die hard.

In Righteous Kill, director Jon Avnet’s hotly anticipated cinematic reunion for Heat stars Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, the two play tough-as-nails veteran NYPD detectives. In summing up their professional partnership, a supporting character simply explains, “They’re like Lennon and McCartney.”

While it’s one of many pop culture references sprinkled throughout Russell Gerwitz’s follow-up screenplay to the Spike Lee smash Inside Man, for all intents and purposes it’s an especially poignant line uttered by a very minor character. Especially considering that that very line and that forgettable character seem to serve as a sort of doorway from the movie to the audience — it essentially echoes our very thoughts as we watch arguably the two finest actors of their generation play off each other with a fiery intensity that’s been missing from some of their more recent by-the-numbers work.

Much like having a favorite Beatle or being able to dub somebody a McCartney or a Lennon person and instinctively get just who they are by their taste (much like Cusack’s character surmised in High Fidelity), film fans can be broken down into two distinct breeds as well. Namely, you have Pacino people and De Niro people. And while acting-wise, they’re both brilliant, due to his consistency and ability to disappear into a role rather than shout (as Pacino is prone to doing a little too often post-“HOOAH!” a.k.a. Scent of a Woman), I’ve always been a De Niro girl. And yes, I’ll even admit that when I was sixteen, I was so passionate about De Niro as “the greatest actor who ever lived,” that I actually did drop a guy who not only cruelly belittled my beloved Bobby D but also said that you can’t even put the two men in the same category.

Of course rejecting someone solely on taste was hastily juvenile and would probably have made terrific fodder for an episode of Seinfeld. However now that more than a decade has passed, sadly we’ve found both De Niro and Pacino often pigeonholed into playing mere caricatures of the characters they are most famous for playing. And while the '00s are finding Sean Penn, Russell Crowe, Don Cheadle, Leonardo DiCaprio, and a few others giving the men a serious run for their money, simply put, Pacino and De Niro are still the Brando and Dean of their generation.

And admittedly the smoldering glances of Pacino back in his heyday made him the one you most wanted to dance the tango with (like Burn Notice’s Gabrielle Anwar did in Woman), there was still something undeniably alluring about De Niro even when he stared down a guy in a bar in GoodFellas without saying a word — perfectly cut to music — and we know he’s just decided to end another character’s life. While they’ve both played monsters, De Niro is like a car crash you can’t look away from. Something hooks you and you find yourself laughing, frighteningly repulsed yet oddly intrigued when he says, “Come out, come out wherever you are” in Cape Fear and even more so when he can take an entire page filled with profanity and make that dialogue sing as though he were Frank Sinatra. What actor on earth hasn’t dreamed about getting cursed out by De Niro onscreen? And hell, the red band trailer for Righteous itself is practically an ode to the f-bomb, although oddly, instead of seeming gratuitous, Pacino and De Niro play those lines as though they were jazz. However, while I urge you to track that one down, for now, we must make do with the green band:

View the Trailer

So aside from my gushing bias where these men are concerned (as I stood in awe and simply stared at the large studio stand for Righteous Kill months back when it first debuted in the lobby of my local multiplex), I think I speak for everyone when I say that after the tease of their brief scenes together in Heat, we simply couldn’t wait for them to spend more time in each other’s company with the camera rolling for longer than ten minutes at a time. Although they’d been co-stars in The Godfather Part II, up until Michael Mann’s L.A. epic Heat, the two men hadn’t shared a single frame and to film buffs, that aforementioned film’s diner conversation felt more like two buddies catching up on the past than a cop and a robber sizing each other up.

Needless to say, they set each other off, each igniting the other man like the worthiest chess opponent and it’s no wonder that Pacino’s Righteous character, nicknamed Rooster, is himself fond of playing chess in New York’s Washington Square Park. Having worked on the force side-by-side with his partner Turk (De Niro) for more than thirty years, the two detectives share an intuition that’s closer than most marriages — able to complete each other’s sentences, even mentally understand the other man’s next move before perhaps he does himself.

The film kicks off with a bang of gunfire as the titans fire rounds “two between the eyes” at a shooting range and while it sets itself up to be just a male bonding film, we’re thrown for a loop when camera footage is revealed and in a voice over De Niro begins commenting on the darker nature of police work. As Turk tells it, their job took a turn four years earlier when he planted a gun on an acquitted child murderer for a homicide the man didn’t commit, just to make sure he wouldn’t walk the same streets as part of the evil 1% he protects the other 99% from on a daily basis. Freely admitting that he crossed that thin blue line, it’s an incident he doesn’t regret and one that even the coolly contemplative Rooster who’d considered the more hot-headed Turk his role model says was not only admirable but “righteous.”

However, when bodies of the city’s “untouchable” and un-prosecutable scum start showing up around town with poems by their corpses revealing the horrific actions of their past, the men’s boss Lieutenant Hingis (Brian Dennehy) begins fearing that not only do they have a new serial killer but he could be one of the city’s finest. And when younger detectives Simon Perez (John Leguizamo) and Ted Riley (Boomtown’s Donnie Wahlberg) begin working the case as well, fingers all start pointing in the direction of Turk and Rooster, leading to a twist-filled yet overly melodramatic conclusion.

Much like Gerwitz’s Inside Man script (which is getting a sequel), there is quite a major surprise involved in Righteous Kill and while I did kick myself for not figuring it out much earlier as actually one very frank clue is revealed within the opening fifteen minutes making me want to see it a second time around, I still couldn’t help feeling slightly disappointed by the contrivances of the storytelling. Instead of a daring and ingenious look at corruption — much like this year’s surprisingly underrated Street Kings — Righteous Kill never aspires to be anything more than a run-of-the-mill police thriller.

While fans of Curtis Jackson (aka 50 Cent) will have fun checking him out opposite Pacino and De Niro, Righteous Kill otherwise wastes not just the two great leading men but more specifically its supporting players. This is especially apparent in an off-putting role for the immensely versatile and talented Carla Gugino who plays a crime scene investigator who only serves to add a titillating and perverse twist to the amoral tale as a kinky masochist involved with Turk but one who gets a fairly upsetting and possibly misogynistic “punishment” for her sexual preferences to set the Heat-like concluding events in motion.

Although it’s always a joy to see De Niro and Pacino in action, given their age there probably aren’t as many calls for them to appear opposite one another as there should be. While you wouldn’t exactly picture them starring in something like The Bucket List or Grumpy Old Men, it’d be great to see them break free from the chains we as ardent fans have placed on them by appreciating them in the type of roles actors such as Tom Wilkinson or Alan Rickman typically play.

While it’s still an entertaining film and one that no doubt will do great business at the box office to see the men in action (although squaring off opposite the new Coen Brothers flick may not have been the best decision marketing-wise), I’m amazed to say that for a police thriller, I’d probably recommend the Keanu Reeves DVD release Street Kings before this one. Although as a De Niro girl, understand that there is no substitute for a big screen reunion of acting’s Lennon and McCartney and those who just want to see the men rock ‘n roll won’t be disappointed in the least.