Review: Out of the Furnace
One star
Christian Bale may be the king of actorly metamorphoses, but his character in Out of the Furnace is just how I imagine he is in real life: dour, depressing and humourless. All of which are adjectives that apply to the film as a whole. Two hours of muscle-flexing, fighting and staring into the middle of distance prove beyond doubt what I always feared: the industrial production of steel falls short both as a venue for engaging drama and as a metaphor for male angst.
Bale plays Russell Baze, a blue-collar furnace worker in an Appalachian steel-town. It’s a life lacking in both excitement and prospects and he also fulfils the role of carer to his terminally ill father with Zen-like dutifulness. The same can’t be said of his younger brother Rodney (Casey Affleck), who returns from a tour of Iraq bearing deep psychological scars. Plagued by horrifying images of war, Rodney rejects the drab prospect of a nine to five at the local steel-mill, and instead forges his own path in the infinitely cheerier world of illicit bare-knuckle fighting.
The brothers face a punishing multiplicity of adversaries. First there’s the American government, which sends kids to Iraq and fails to provide jobs for them when they get back. Then there’s the Chinese, who are undercutting American labour costs. And then, when things look like they can’t get any worse, they wander into the path of Woody Harrelson’s Harlan DeGroat, a psychopathic redneck who’s suffered none of the physical drawbacks of a presumably limited gene-pool (unless you count an addiction to meth, which he enjoys injecting into his grizzled big toe).
In its second half, Out of the Furnace abandons the wider political context that the lumpen script strained to establish in the first. It turns from a straight-faced thriller with political aspirations into a bargain-basement Deliverance. Writer-director Scott Cooper insists on filming the brooding steel mill every five seconds – up on the hill, it lingers in the back of every shot like an absurd monument to all the ideas that go unexplored in the film.
The excellent cast does its best with shoddy material, but no amount of talent could save this – an embarrassment of acting riches descends into an embarrassment for all involved.