There is a path to invincibility, though it just as easily presents a straight line to oblivion. Frank learned this years ago in the prison yard after killing a man and, expecting retaliation, finding himself suddenly untouchable.
“I don’t care about me, I don’t care about nothin’,” he explains in a midnight cafe in Michael Mann’s “Thief.” That’s how he’s always managed to survive.
There are stories of quiet desperation, and then there are the kinds in the films from this month: Stories of people sprinting to the edge because they have nothing to lose. They have nothing left to fear because they have no other choice.
‘Bad Lieutenant’ (1992)
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Definitively stamping the director Abel Ferrara’s reputation for controversy, this film is a multiday bender that epitomizes the idea of degeneracy. Harvey Keitel plays an unnamed, unhinged police lieutenant who gradually digs himself into a hole with a bookie, amplifying his craven impulses to steal, cheat, snort, smoke, shoot up and shootout across New York City’s gutters.
It’s a downward spiral that is dirty and offensive (particularly the unrated version) but impossible to look away from. Ferrera is a filmmaker who fetishizes grime and gets away with it because you know it comes from his own time in the mud.
The movie is also deeply tormented. Ferrara pushes to extremes in order to exorcise them — at one point, the lieutenant sobs at a hallucination of a crucified Jesus. (Is there another filmmaker both unabashedly lurid and genuinely religious?) All of this hinges on Keitel’s performance, which is so committed you wonder if he’s not actually doing drugs himself.
‘Dog Day Afternoon’ (1975)
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The bracing energy of this classic always pulls you in, but its comedy can be overlooked — it’s surprising how a film this raw can be so slyly funny. You forget because what always crowds the memory is the staggering force of Al Pacino — his sweat, his wild eyes like saucers, his thunderous cries of “Attica!”
Based on a true story, Sidney Lumet’s film tracks the tense hours when Sonny (Pacino) and his partner-in-crime Sal (John Cazale, subtly genius) rob a bank and, when things go awry, hole up with the employees.
In their increasingly harebrained desperation — particularly those heartbreaking phone calls between Sonny and his lover, then his wife — is a story about Vietnam, queer liberation, state violence, sticky summer heat and hard, hard times. But mostly it’s a captivating thriller, centered not on an antihero exactly but, more meaningfully, just a man. He’s not crazed but crumbling. He just can’t deal anymore in a time when a lot of other people can’t either.
‘Gloria’ (1980)
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More than the other greats, the actress Gena Rowlands conjures the feeling of towering presence. See: the violent mania of “A Woman Under the Influence” and the haunted erraticism of “Opening Night,” both from John Cassavetes. Her trademark is the sense of being totally unmoored.
That’s familiar in Gloria, a woman suddenly sent on the run to protect her neighbor’s son Phil (John Adames) from the mob in this other Cassavetes classic. But, here, her power is subtly, fascinatingly reconstituted as a reluctant force — but, naturally, with Rowlands, still a force — for stability and protection. What makes “Gloria” electric and even funny, though never cloying or over-the-top, is how she turns that chaos into grudging self-possession.
Then there’s Phil. Unfairly maligned when the film was released, Adames completes their odd couple dynamic in a performance that is deceptively true. In all his fidgety outbursts we see a young, confused kid who’s playacting his way through a scary underworld.
‘Thief’ (1981)
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Anger and anguish, the first laid thick atop the other — that’s the core of James Caan’s character, Frank, in Michael Mann’s showstopping debut. The anger is easy to spot and fun to watch: Frank is a heist man who takes nothing from nobody, until eventually he gets in too deep with a kingpin (Robert Prosky).
Caan plays streetwise menace with a natural charisma that’s close to the surface; buried underneath is a wounded child. It’s there in the kidlike postcard he keeps in his wallet, made of magazine cutouts telling him the story of his life.
But what really sears into our memory and foreshadows so much of Mann’s later work is the pure allure of aura: those rain-slicked Chicago streets, neon lights gliding off the hood of a car and a score that feels like the future.
‘You Were Never Really Here’ (2017)
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After an animalistic scuffle in a motel room leaves him battered and covered in someone else’s brains, Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), the explosive protagonist of this film, is seen recovering in an alleyway. His beard matted with blood, he sticks a pair of pliers into his mouth and yanks out a loose tooth, then grunts from the alcohol poured down his face.
This is basically what it feels like to watch Lynne Ramsay’s film: cold steel to tooth, the shock and burn of solution after.
Ramsay is after a visceral sensory experience of cinema, telling this story of Joe, a brutal and traumatized killer-for-hire who specializes in enacting vengeance on child traffickers, in a chilling, often impressionistic montage of image and sound. It is a potent swirl of the memories Joe can’t get out of his head.
It’s also the purest distillation of Phoenix’s cold, primal energy, which he uses here to excavate layers of Joe’s buried pain: of the past; of unspeakable things done behind closed doors; of the pure physical pain he inflicts on other, the closest thing to a justice never to be found.
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