We Own the Night

Atmosphere and good acting make this movie better than it should be. The script is fearless and takes its time to go nowhere in particular--both characteristics I admire--but the whole revenge spectacle in the last five minutes left me remembering the cowardly noise of the mighty brush shootout, which was not only incredible (as in not credible) but also totally unnecessary, while forgetting all the little minutes left waiting for Mark Wahlberg's silence, a firecrackle beauty and blueness about it, like cold water.

I suppose I feel about We Own the Night the way a coach feels about a quitter or the way I feel about myself this morning, staring down a third-rate dissertation, too cautious to summon the wild wisdom of true knowing but too serious not to be wild with all regret: "it has tremendous potential; it could have worked, and in a new way as well. But in the end, it went white, waxy, generic." I would feel better about this movie if it hadn't done so much original work in its first ninety percent--if I hadn't spent the last eight years thinking myself right up to the critical moment when everything makes sense, when, as Coleridge wrote--and he too knew something of cowardice--"the points are but little."

Sometimes we refuse to finish the one thing that, once completed, will make us memorable. The guarantee of authorship, the confidence that exclaims "I am something, I exist," not only distinguishes us by our accomplishment but also threatens to disclose the very individuality we spin fiction to protect. Art is as much a way of hiding as it is a tool for revealing; its creator is the ghost in the machine, impervious to the body's pain but powerless to enjoy its pleasure. Authors are theoretical engines: vague, unqualified, empty.

We Own the Night felt like it was going to be genuinely new, its own, unprecedented energy, and it was--until Joaquin Phoenix took a shotgun into a smoky field and cut down his nemesis. As far as I could tell, the film spent an hour and a half carefully avoiding the tired conventions of police procedural only to yield in its final minutes to the lamest shtick of all: a vigilante hero.

True, I'm down on my own mousy scholarship, and that is no charitable mood in which to indulge one's sententiae. But let's not get cute. Because I make them myself and am therefore immune to their doom-dumbing prophecy, I can spot on sight excuses in the great fakers, from Queensberry to The Queen is Dead. Art, like life, is a confidence game. You must make them believe until it's too late and too terrible not to accept the illusion. Five minutes may not sound like a long time, but take my word for it, even one is enough. The biggest failure is the one that comes closest to success.