For those of us who grew up watching Woody Harrelson as the lovably boneheaded Woody Boyd on Cheers, there is something irresistible about seeing him so fully embody the tortured characters he’s taken on of late. That winning smile that once seemed so innocent now hides something menacing and dangerous. This attraction fully in play, I contemplated spending two hours and twelve bucks to see him as an irredeemably corrupt cop in Rampart.
I then listened to Elvis Mitchell’s interview with Rampart director Oren Moverman on KCRW’s “The Treatment.” Moverman, who directed Harrelson in 2009’s excellent The Messenger, spoke of his unusual process in creating the film, one in which the script was used only as a loose guide during production and sometimes thrown out altogether. Harrelson and the rest of the cast were free to improvise, and sometimes came up with new dialogue—even entirely new scenes—on the spot. Amassing some 100 hours of material, they ended up with a shooting ratio more common to documentaries than to narrative features.
The result could, of course, be a mess. But it also sounded tantalizingly close to genius. Moverman promised that narrative would take a back seat to character, overwhelming convention and cliché altogether. Excited by his seemingly experimental approach, I was sold.
Too bad those promises aren’t kept by the finished film.
Rampart is not a disaster, but it’s a long, long way from genius. It’s a flawed experiment in which narrative is surprisingly, frustratingly intact, and often an albatross that holds the film back from its true potential.
The frequent deviations and omissions from the original script result in a story that is thin. The plot can be summed up in one sentence: an internal police investigation is uncovering rampant abuse and misconduct in the Los Angeles Police Department, and veteran officer Dave Brown (Harrelson), a bad man getting badder by the day as his paranoia intensifies, keeps getting hauled in to explain himself. That’s it. Brown is in trouble with his superiors at the beginning of the story, in deeper trouble in the middle of the story, and in really deep trouble at the end, but since the fine points of the plot have been scrubbed away the details no longer have any bite, and nothing really develops. Sigourney Weaver as an LAPD higher-up keeps getting madder at him, and Ned Beatty as a retired officer keeps mumbling ominous words about his future, but since we never grasp the particulars and the words don’t have any identifiable result, they feel remote and disconnected from Brown and his world.
With the right choices, this confusion could have been made productive. Moverman wants to create a subjective point of view in which we, like Brown, wonder what is real as the story progresses. Some of Moverman’s camera choices (which feature cinema verité handheld camera and many shots in which Harrelson is blocked from easy view) seem to reflect Brown’s paranoia. As we watch him, it feels like he himself is being watched.
But Moverman doesn’t take his own ideas seriously enough. In order to really enter Brown’s head, the background plot elements needed to recede much further into the background; they are portrayed too clearly to play as subjective, and are too omnipresent to allow us to get very far into Brown’s head. For the “throw the script out the window” approach to work, we needed to understand less about the facts of the investigation, not more. We needed to be put in a situation much more faithful to the principles of true cinema verité, in which ambiguity produces a tantalizingly partial account of a story in order to fully engage the audience in their own search for answers. There are so many hypnotic scenes of Harrelson—brooding in his car, drinking in bars, staring red-faced at his daughters in a tragically inept attempt at reconciliation—that the mundane particulars of the investigation are simply much less interesting to watch.
Another question: does a pure character study mix well with a script by James Ellroy? Judging from the result here, it seems the answer is “no.” Ellroy’s hardboiled dialogue is always one step away from pure silliness, and while there are some real winners here (“I’m not racist, Brown states matter-of-factly. “I hate everyone equally.”) there are far more losers. One also has the uncomfortable suspicion that the film’s ostensible condemnation of Brown’s brand of vigilante justice is laced with an undeniable glee in watching him perform it. Brown is certainly no hero, but neither is he an effective anti-hero, and the fact that the Rampart scandal is an all too real part of the LAPD’s history makes one all the more uneasy seeing it portrayed so casually. One only has to go back to the baldly racist portrayal of African-Americans in LA Confidential to find evidence of difficulties in translating Ellroy to the big screen.
I walked out of the theater still intrigued by what else was hidden in those 100 hours of footage. Was there a way to treat this film more like the hyper-subjective descent into madness that Moverman hinted was his intention? Would the omission of 15 minutes worth of exposition in the final product have helped achieve the same thing? Ah, playing armchair quarterback is so easy compared to the messy, complicated work of directing…
