Narc; Top 10 in '02

For viewers who wish mainstream movies weren't so nice, Narc is a dark dream come true. This much-hyped movie from writer-director Joe Carnahan about a young cop (Jason Patric) investigating a veteran (Ray Liotta) suspected of murdering a fellow officer, plays like a bastard stepchild of Joseph Wambaugh and Quentin Tarantino. It's a fantastically vicious vigilante thriller gussied up in the respectable dress blues of a police procedural. From its handheld opening foot chase, which sees undercover operative Tellis (Patric) chasing a flipped-out druggie through a housing project and accidentally shooting a pregnant woman to death, to its intense, protracted, torture-heavy finale, which drenches costar Busta Rhymes in appropriately purplish blood, Narc might as well have the words, "Fuck you if you can't take it" stamped at the bottom of every frame.

After the harrowing prologue, which might have motion-sickness-afflicted moviegoers barfing up their popcorn, the movie settles down into a brisk, superficially fresh take on the Deep Cover genre, in which an emotionally tortured but essentially good cop agrees to befriend (or impersonate) a very bad person, then finds himself understanding and even liking that person. After the shooting incident, departmental bureaucrats offer Tellis a vague chance at redemption if he'll agree to partner up with Henry Oak (Liotta, in a career-capping star turn), a goateed, thick-around-the-middle narcotics officer whose own partner, an undercover cop, was murdered six months earlier in a drug deal gone bad. Oak is a decorated centurion whose righteous anger and reflexive physicality are respected by fellow cops and dreaded by Oak's p.r.-sensitive bosses. (Their ranks include Boston Public star Chi McBride, playing yet another one of those "My hands are tied" bureaucrat types.) Right off the bat, Oak warns Tellis that he's been ordered to stop investigating his former partner's death but has no intention of doing so. He still has hunches to play, and Tellis indulges him; their cowboy-style, off-the-books investigation dovetails with (and sometimes overlaps) Tellis' investigation of Oak, producing several plausible suspects.

Although it's set in Detroit, Narc is a conscious throwback to early 70s New York thrillers like The French Connection, Serpico and Prince of the City-a psychological drama about the intersection of tribalism and justice. Carnahan writes in the florid tough-guy vernacular of Tarantino and Mamet and peppers the script with cop slang so oblique it verges on Esperanto. He shoots each speculative flashback with the same quick-cut, poker-in-the-eye intensity, leaving you no choice but to accept every new suspect as the Real Killer. He and his talented cinematographer, Alex Nepomniaschy, bleach the color from Narc's dirty wintertime panoramas, and they appear to have shot much of the movie with a handheld camera, even the static and dolly shots. As a result, a subtle aura of unease and instability pervades Narc even in its quieter moments. (While taking in a haunting medium-distance shot of Tellis sitting on a couch at home, doting on his infant child, I got unaccountably nervous, wondering if some evil perp was about to leap through a window and start shooting.)

As written by Carnahan and acted by the wary, intelligent Patric, Tellis is no cupcake. Despite his bleak worldview and careerist streak (the up-all-night requirements of his undercover life predictably strain his otherwise ideal marriage), Tellis is a best-case-scenario cop-a head-busting, no-illusions liberal. Like Al Pacino in Serpico and Treat Williams in Prince of the City, Tellis seems to have joined the force despite his mistrust of authority. Oak is his opposite, a badge-toting Archie Bunker who divides the world into two categories: participants in civilization, and its enemies. (In Oak's defense, he's a damaged man still coping with the death of his wife-yet another cop-film cliche that's powerful anyway, thanks to a painfully honest confessional monologue, nimbly performed by Liotta and covered by Carnahan with almost no cutting.)

While Narc is built around a tired cop-corruption tale, it respects the overpowering anger and despair that many veteran street cops have to suppress in order to function. It also understands the connection between police work and acting with a depth few cop films muster. Like professional actors, Tellis and Oak work themselves into character, study each new set (and its props) for seeds of inspiration, then play hunches that unravel the drama. (In one of the movie's most credible scenes, Oak studies the corpse of a drug-addled felon who died of a shotgun blast while soaking in a tub and realizes it wasn't murder; the guy was too stoned to get out of the tub to fetch his pipe, so he used his shotgun as a substitute.)

Carnahan is a fiendishly facile director whose first feature, the low-budget black comedy Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane, put a Tarantino-esque spin on life as a used-car dealer. Narc is an independently financed movie picked up by Paramount after an ecstatic reaction from Tom Cruise and his business partner, Paula Wagner, who are now credited as executive producers. Another A-list star, Harrison Ford, liked Narc enough to hire Carnahan to direct his next picture, A Walk Among the Tombstones. One can certainly see why Carnahan's ferociously edgy yet plot-driven style appeals to Hollywood's top male stars: it allows them to be edgy within familiar, saleable parameters (the action-packed, R-rated, arthouse genre flick) while playing characters who are more interesting than sympathetic. All things considered, "interesting" is a much more laudable quality than "sympathetic"; the first is the nucleus of good storytelling, while the second matters mainly to Hollywood hacks and studio execs. Nevertheless, when you look back over Narc, Carnahan's take-no-prisoners posture seems calculated and compromised. The film's a pulp thriller posing as an auteurist arthouse flick-which is to say that it wants to be outrageous without being accused of trying too hard to be outrageous.

The Tellis-Oak juxtaposition is the script's most intriguing element; in scene after violent scene, I much prefer the characters' finely shaded reactions to mayhem over the mayhem itself, which is nihilistic and slapsticky in that familiar, post-Goodfellas way. We're supposed to laugh at the cops' audacious brutality, then feel ashamed of ourselves for laughing. But in contrast to Goodfellas, which used unreliable narration and documentary devices to put intellectual distance between us and the characters, Carnahan's film gets super-close to Oak and Tellis throughout, forcing us to identify with them. Narc is a crowd-pleasing, coercive piece of entertainment, and, ironically, that's what stifles its potential as pop art. In the end, one suspects Carnahan's natural impulse is to entertain at any cost-to beat a reaction out of you through sudden gunfire, anti-p.c. race-baiting, baroque profanity or Oliver Stone-like transitions-and that the film's veneer of sociological detail and psychological realism is just a pose. As a director, Carnahan is more Oak than Tellis. I admit Narc held me spellbound; my confession was coerced.

My Top 10 (or 11) Films of 2002:

1. The Pinochet Case (Patrizio Guzman, Chile)

2. The Pianist (Roman Polanski, USA)

3. Minority Report/Catch Me If You Can (Steven Spielberg, USA)

4. Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese, USA)

5. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk, Canada)

6. Domestic Violence (Frederick Wiseman, USA)

7. Family Fundamentals (Arthur Dong, USA)

8. Last Orders (Fred Schepisi, Australia)

9. Metropolis (Taro Rin, Japan)

10. Road to Perdition (Sam Mendes, USA)