'Rampart': A brilliant performance by Woody Harrelson, and a lesson as subtle as the business end of a nightstick
Woody Harrelson in Rampart.
8:19 pm Feb. 8, 2012
The trouble with Rampart is that, like its corrupt-cop protagonist, it is excessive.
Director Oren Moverman (The Messengers) collaborated on the film’s script with renowned true-crime writer James Ellroy. The result is uneven: When the film is about a fallible individual who sees conspiracies threatening to close in on him, Rampart is terrific; when it’s about the macro-level effects of the real-life Rampart Scandal of 1998, Rampart is self-important and over-extended.
Woody Harrelson stars as Dave Brown, a vicious, no-nonsense neo-Dirty Harry who beats suspects first and asks questions later. Dave is the unapologetic poster-child for the police brutality that came under close public scrutiny during the Rampart Scandal, which played out at a time when Los Angeles police officers were synonymous with racial profiling and abusive tactics. In this context, Dave is not a misunderstood monster, but an earnest brutalizer. He is also a family man.
Dave’s paradoxical dual identity as a bad cop who’s also constantly trying to do right by his family is what fascinates Moverman and Ellroy. But their character study is remarkably unsubtle, destroying the delicate balance created by Harrelson’s towering performance and Rampart’s sometimes excellent dialogue.
Take, for instance, Dave’s pseudo-complicated relationships with the many women in his life. First there’s Barbara and Catherine (Cynthia Nixon and Anne Heche), sisters who are also both Dave’s ex-wives and the mothers of each of his two daughters. Dave unwisely tries to keep his family together by having Barbara, Catherine and his two daughters live together with him. But despite being surrounded by women, he doesn’t change his ways: He continues to sleep around, drink heavily and beat suspects.
So whenever Dave tries to connect with his rebellious teen daughter Helen (Brie Larson), he fails because he simply can’t change. Nixon speaks for every woman who is attracted to, loves or simply has to deal with Dave, including Sigourney Weaver’s district attorney and Robin Wright’s sympathetic but conflicted defense attorney-cum-mistress, when she says, “You can’t make the decisions for us anymore. You gotta let us go.”
“That’s unacceptable,” Dave says, before adding, “I’ll never let you go.”
The cinematography is just as heavy-handed. Moverman shot the film with plenty of glaring natural light, oversaturating the film’s color palette in order to reflect Dave’s hazy, boozy, self-righteous perspective. It only serves to remind us of Moverman and Ellroy’s authorial presences, pulling Dave’s strings. The film’s shadows are too dark—literally—and its white lights are too blinding.
It is similarly distracting when in a scene in which Dave has suffered an inevitable personal defeat. He checks into a hotel by blackmailing the concierge. As he makes his way to the check-in desk, Moverman’s camera lingers on the reflection of the “Exit” sign in the lobby’s black marble floor. He is telling us that Dave is looking to get out, and that he’s not finding anything other than a shadow of the exit he needs.
At one point, when Dave rationalizes and analyzes his self-righteous psychosis in all-caps declarations, it’s like a verbal assault: “There’s no way out. Every single word you’ve heard and more—it’s all true. I could never change … But I want you to know: I never hurt any good people.”
Helen replies, “What about us?”
She might as well be speaking for the film’s audience.
Still, Harrelson’s performance as Dave is so good that he almost manages to smooth over all of the lumpy material he’s been handed.
When Kyle Timkins (Ice Cube), a social worker looking into Dave’s abuses of power, pointedly asks Dave why, after all the trouble he’s caused, he still hasn’t been fired, Harrelson flashes an impish grin and crows, “Must be because I’m innocent.” The cold, hard malice inherent in that smile is incredibly effective.
Harrelson’s performance often transcends the very rough edges of Moverman and Ellroy’s rough creative decisions. One especially moving scene comes when Dave’s trying to have a talk with Helen. She refuses to let him off the hook, listing his many faults, including being racist and sexist. He clumsily asks her how high school’s going and she replies that it’s fine as usual but it’s still “full of candy-ass future dykes and fags. Those are your words.”
The wounded look on Harrelson’s face when he denies it is so convincing that even though you know Helen’s right, you want to believe that Dave is, too.
