Cop Land
Alleva, Richard
Richard Alleva OFF DUTY 'Coil Laud' hen a melodrama really Wworks, no one, not even a critic, sits around grousing about its lack of psycholo gy, sociology, or sentiment. Who would trade the...
...Take that, Giuliani...
...no matter how tolerable they find Freddy, they can't think of him as anything other than a big boy at best, at worst a lumbering clown...
...Wolfe's work will be the standard for tltiggeridge studies for years to come...
...LARRY WOIWODE "Bound to become the definitive biography of Muggeridge...
...James Mangold's script has an irresistible set-up...
...Back and forth each workday these men go into or out of New York, but even when twilight finds them in their cosy ranch houses or in their for-cops-only bars, they've still got the city racketing in their skulls...
...No one plays an-ulcer-waiting-to-happen better than Keitel...
...as he will for future generations, who will owe Wnlfe a great debt for his wonderfully readable account of Mtiggcridgu life...
...Or insist that the noose-tightening power of In the Line of Fire is worth less than the windy speculations of Oliver Stone's JFK...
...Some cops, sickened by their New York City beats, have settled their families into a tranquil New Jer sey town...
...But about those honest men...
...So only by taking matters into his own hands can Freddy achieve justice...
...He has invented a big conspiracy to energize his story, but I think it's the wrong sort of energy...
...Unable to join the N.Y.P.D...
...Implausibility leads to implausibility...
...But the best performance by far is Harvey Keitel's as the unofficial mayor of the town...
...A limited but powerful player, Keitel has spent half his career playing angry lawmen...
...Freddy discovers not only that some cops have come up with the money for their homes by winking at big-city drug dealing but they've also concealed the whereabouts of a young patrolman whose shooting of some criminals could be interpreted as vigilantism...
...No matter how rowdily the off-duty cops behave, Freddy regards them as heroes...
...Cops bust criminals...
...And cannot just force sometimes corrode as surely as the unjust use of it...
...But it takes more than effective acting and slick direction to produce a firstrate movie...
...And what would those be...
...because of partial deafness, he drinks with cops, tries to break up their fights, sees the girl he's always pined for (the very she for whom he sacrificed his hearing while rescuing her) marry a cop, and witnesses small-town delin quencies, marital problems, feuds...
...Fightsbreak out over beers and thecops go home to beat their wives (who are often sleeping with other cops...
...Again, it's dramatic cynicism, and it keeps Mangold from pursuing the deeper implications of his own story...
...There are some clever strokes, such as the way a big-time cover-up in the big city is paralleled by Freddy's two-bit concealment of his own drunk driving...
...Such is the case with COP Land...
...The sheriff of this town, Freddy Heflin (Sylvester Stallone), may be a law officer but he knows he's not a real cop...
...In Cop Land all the adulterers, wifebeaters, and barroom brawlers also seem to be in on the drug conspiracy that Freddy explodes...
...A good filmmaker knows where the heart of his material is, and I'm not sure that Mangold does...
...He lives again and heneFits u, again...
...Who would trade the delicious rot of Chinatown for an in-depth study of incest...
...The latter crime is supposed to uncover the former but there's no real connection between the two, and the fugitive cop could have been easily cleared merely by examining his bullet WM...
...And this one-man-strike is connived at by the frustrated Internal Affairs investigator...
...Paunched up and more sad-eyed than ever, he is sufficiently pathetic slumped against a bar and, for some heroics in the last reel, he's only as heroic as Freddv wou Id be-no Ramboesque invulnerability bu t just a good man driven to his limits...
...But suppose they weren't...
...2551EEEERSON AVE...
...S.E.1 GRAND RAPIDS, ME 49503 ridden tires and finding a certain shotgun...
...Mangold is so eager to turn his movie into High Noon that he cynically manipulates his own story...
...Just when Freddy is about to cooperate with Internal Affairs, the case is shut down by New York's mayor, who has been suborned by drug kingpins...
...This biography is both an inspiration and a call to repentance to any who think they can exist as 'carnal' Christians...
...This is the substance of the great, phantom, unmade Cop Land hovering behind the fatally flawed, though fairly entertaining Cop Land now playing...
...Sylvester Stallone's Second Coming turns out to be ...not bad at all...
...D MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE :1 1110t1 It .. I'll Y GREGORY WOLFE "Malcolm Muggeridge is a figure of enduring interest, and his life, trihulationc, and legacy are examined by Gregory Wolfe with a marvelous eve...
...There's hardly anything Muggeridge didn't try until the Lord laid him low...
...Freddy hands out speeding tickets to tourists on their way to the Big Apple...
...In fact, they are the town...
...At several points in the action, it would benefit the corrupt cops to murder Freddy, but these villains, who don't hesitate to murder their fellow officers to conceal evidence, are perfectly content to warn the sheriff off...
...And couldn't honest cops, even in the bucolic bliss of some small New Jersey town, find that violence and corruption have infiltrated their hearts, disrupted their peace, shattered their families...
...Had the gentleman never heard of the New York Times and the time-honored American traditions of whistleblowing and news leaks...
...But when a melodrama doesn't quite work, yet has something of value in it, there may seem to be another movie, a better movie, perhaps even a non-melodramatic movielooming upbehind (and rebuking) the film you're watching...
...Why such restraint from such desperadoes...
...And theacting is generally good, though a spectacular trio of actresses Janeane Garafalo, Cathy Moriarty, Annabella Sciorra-can do no more than fill out sketchy roles...
...Writer-director Mangold does his own evocative material intermittent justice...
...This performance is the actor's ne plus ultra...
...B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING CO...
...PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ISBN 0-8028-383`)-1 • 480 pages hardcover 18 black-and-white photos • $35.00 At your bookstore, or call 1-800-253-7521 FAX...
...At the conclusion of this movie we are meant to believe that the town has been morally cleansed because a few corrupt cops are gone while all the resthonest men and true-can live in peace...
...616-459-6540 E-mail: wbesales?eerdmans.com Commonweal 18 September 26,1997...
...Don't some honest cops beat their wives...
...Surely the real, bleak vision of Cop Land resides precisely with those honest cops who are kept entirely off screen...
...In this headlong and unapologetic look at Malculm Muggeridge, (;rcturv Wnlte has entered his subject's life in the most unobtrusive and salutary way, by adopting the attitude of a servant, so that the reader rides at the turbulent center of one of the most quixotic, troubled, and fascinating figures of twentieth-century Christendom...
...Do not honest policemen occasionally have to use violence in the performance of their duties...
...1 9q' lating somewhere between Keitel's hunched shoulders as he stares down at his beer glass and snarls at his chums...
...WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR...
...Good melodrama has a poetry of its own...
...practically everyone in sight is a cop or the spouse or child of one...
...All the resentment of underappreciated, underpaid cops and sensation-hungry press, seems to be coaguCrrrur,w,nr•riO 17 , PfrmI er 2t...
Vol. 124 • September 1997 • No. 16
