Strong Silent Type
Dr. Daniel's review of Cop Land

medical miracle

Starring Sylvester Stallone, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Peter Berg, Janeane Garofalo, Robert Patrick, Michael Rapaport, Annabella Sciorra, Malik Yoba, Noah Emmerich, Cathy Moriarty, Debbie Harry, James Caan, Daniel Stern

Directed by James Mangold. Rated R.

    Okay, here's the deal. I'll be the first to confess a deep, dark secret. It weighs heavy on my heart, and, as Martha Nell always says, "The truth will set you free." So, here goes: I've always been of a mind that Sylvester Stallone was a pretty good actor. I know, I know. "His chief talents are his pecs and his biceps." "He can run the emotional gamut from A to B." "He's a musclehead with more dollars than acting chops." I know all the arguments, and, for the most part, I'm inclined to agree with 'em. For the most part.
     There are times when he hits a point, though, and he becomes an actor rather than an action hero. Contrary to a popular belief, the two are not the same thing. If our other action-hero bookend, Arnold Schwarzenegger, would ever learn this small fact and store it in his humidor, what a wonderful world it would be. Arnold's best acting in any of his formulaic films came in one where he altered the formula. His performance in Twins was remarkable. Was it Oscar-caliber material? Lord, no, and I'd laugh at anyone who said otherwise, but the part was so far against type, it focused folks' opinion in a whole new direction. Take a look at Bruce Willis in In Country if you ever get a chance. No guns, no feet in broken glass, no explosions, just a solid portrayal of a tormented soul trying to put some Life back in his life.
    And that's what I spy in Stallone once in a while. Forget all the movies with Roman numerals after them. And forget everything he's done where he played a rhinestone cowboy or an arm wrestler. Just throw out all that crap. Look instead at the basics. Look at Paradise Alley or F.I.S.T, and you can see those flashes of greatness, yearning to be free. Watch Nighthawks the next time Turner runs it, which'll probably be right now. A taste of character development, some heart, some intensity.
     But, like most stars with a following, he started making dumb decisions. At the turn of the decade, he declared himself to be through with the action genre, and began experimenting with comedy. Seeing that was like having eye surgery without anesthesia. He ran back to the action genre and cranked out Demolition Man, The Specialist, and Judge Dredd. Not so much movies, but more like excuses to get props for his latest Planet Hollywood franchise. His box office take has been slipping steadily since Rocky V, and with last year's weak Daylight and rumours of a new Rambo effort, it became clear that Stallone was a crash test dummy headed shotgun toward a tall wall.
     Somewhere, though, amid all the madness, some wise soul slipped him a script called Cop Land, and whispered three words: Travolta, Pulp Fiction. And, while Stallone probably won't win a ton of statuettes for it, he did show that he can indeed act. And he does it by going back to his roots and finding the character that started it all for him.
     In Cop Land, Sly stars as Freddy Heflin, a smalltown sheriff in the fictional town of Garrison, New Jersey. Freddy's one claim to fame in Garrison is that he once saved a girl from drowning, an act of bravery that cost him the hearing in one ear and kept him shackled to the town forever instead of propelling him higher. The town is right across the bridge from Manhattan, and is populated mainly by NYPD cops who write their own rules of behavior. Freddy is kind of the hometown outsider. He wants these cops' respect as a law enforcement official, but they treat him like the local schmo earning a brown-collar paycheck. He ignores a lot of the city cops' behavior with an "Aw, shucks," attitude, hoping it'll get him in the club. Instead it just makes him that much more of a joke to the "real" cops.
     Suddenly, Freddy gets pulled into a huge internal-affairs investigation by a pushy IAD officer (Robert De Niro), and he gets his eyes opened to what's really going on under his nose. And Freddy gets the chance to be a real officer of the law. Finally.
     The plot is a lot more complicated than that, and I'll leave it to you, gentle readers, to find your way through it. It becomes like a silverscreen brain teaser, with the object being to distinguish the bad guys from the good guys. Writer/director James Mangold fashions a film as tight as disco jeans, and amazingly, keeps the plot from becoming a confusing mess. It also helps that he's loaded the cast with a roster of pure power hitters. Robert DeNiro, Harvey Keitel, and Ray Liotta are all testosterone timebombs (no secret there), and they could've run rampant through the forest, if Mangold had allowed them to. In fact, Liotta plays a coke addict. Can you imagine Liotta on any sort of stimulant? He always looks like he had a No-Doze sandwich and three cups of Waffle House coffee anyway. Here, he's about one step away from having his head explode like a Scanner, every vein and artery in his skull standing out like coax cables...but he never goes over the edge. Congratulations to anyone who could rein in the Ray Method.
     The heart to all this, though, is Sly. He's not the banger here. Nor is he the preachy hero. Stallone's Freddy Heflin is a watcher - he lives, cursing his own fate in private, unspoken misery. He's on the outside looking in, and he despises it. And when he is finally given the chance to be a doer, he's reactive rather than active. Freddy is gentle, he's softspoken, he just wants the chance to be somebody. In short, Freddy Heflin is Rocky Balboa, plugging away until he can get that one magic chance to go for the title.
     Folks, this is not some art house-perfecto. It has some flaws. It threatens to blow up near the end, a la Conspiracy Theory, and some pretty good supporting players get lost in the flood of leading male chromosomes. But, as a twisting exercise in a wide-open field, it works wonders. It's a taut story about an Everyman digging deep to find the hero within, the man he always dreamed of being, just as he was ready to give up. A smart cast, a finely-tuned script, and crisp editing and direction, Cop Land is a strong, silent winner in every way.
     Don't read into this as any sort of plea for Stallone to win an Oscar®. I do, however, see a huge opportunity here for Stallone. If it takes Freddy Heflin to wash years of Rambo, Tango, and Judge Dredd out of his system, so be it. Sly, listen up. You just made a movie that your director calls a "suburban western." Take this as gospel. The parallels between Cop Land and High Noon are huge. High Noon redefined its genre. Cop Land takes the standard good cop - bad cop police thriller and steers it toward new territory as well. Gary Cooper won an Academy Award for his performance as Will Kane, the lone marshall in town, against a slew of bad guys, against all odds. You are playing Freddy Heflin, the lone sheriff in town, against a slew of bad guys, against all odds. You figure it out. It was worth the forty pounds of weight gain. You lost the muscles, and you found your character. And your talent, at last.