Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

Movies

‘God’s Pocket’ crafted with great skill

PARK CITY – It’s high praise when a film adaptation of a novel makes you want to go back and read the book. Such is the case with Pete Dexter’s novel “God’s Pocket,” co-written for the screen by “Mad Men” star John Slattery, who also makes his big-screen directorial debut here. Slattery expertly navigates Coen Brothers terrain by shifting from the mordant to the gruesome in a tale of a community of lowlifes living in a blue-collar quarter of Philadelphia circa 1980.

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Slattery’s “Mad Men” colleague Christina Hendricks play the parents of a loutish 23-year-old with a bad habit of threatening people with a straight razor. One of his fellow construction workers kills the kid for being a racist imbecile and general nuisance, but the workers close ranks by pretending an industrial accident is to blame, an explanation that the Hendricks character properly finds hard to believe. Soon an alcoholic but talented newspaper columnist (Richard Jenkins, superb as usual) and a mobster are on the case, while the Hoffman character and his butcher friend (John Turturro) try to get back to their daily routines of stealing trucks and betting on horses. Instead, the bereaved dad winds up blowing the funeral money on a bet.

Working-class films must chart a narrow path between over-sentimentalization and flat-out condescension, and I think Slattery does so with great skill: The trick is to see your characters, no matter how self-defeating and ignorant they may be, as people instead of buffoons. The performances are textured and sympathetic (though the patrician Hendricks, to me, comes off as of a different social class than those around her) and the atmosphere is richly depressing,with spot-on production design if slightly too much use of dramatically backlit interiors.

But it’s the waspish dialogue and the zany story that take top honors, the plot zig-zagging unpredictably as even minor characters seize the opportunity to re-route the action to the point that the unfortunate deceased youth manages to get killed (sort of) a second time. You could argue that the film ends with a kind of shrug (a point that could be made about many of the Coen Brothers films as well), but I like the way things culminate with the working-class men deciding as a unit to blame the messenger who accurately describes what they are. This isn’t a terribly commercial release, and the audience at the Eccles responded with only moderate applause, but to me it’s a prestige item suitable for a distributor like Sony Pictures Classics.