Movie reviews
When Mickey Scarpato’s (Philip Seymour Hoffman) crazy son Leon (Caleb Landry Jones) dies on a construction site, Mickey’s wife Jeanie (Christina Hendricks) suspects that Leon’s death was no accident. Struggling to pay for Leon’s funeral, Mickey tries to find out what really happened to Leon; meanwhile, alcoholic journalist Richard Shelburn (Richard Jenkins) seems more interested in seducing the grieving Jeanie than he does in uncovering the truth about Leon’s death.
Adapted from Pete Dexter’s novel, John Slattery’s film is a heartbreaking reminder of what contemporary cinema lost when Philip Seymour Hoffman died earlier this year. Hoffman is superb as the put-upon loser Mickey, an outsider scuffling around the fringes of a tightly-knit community. Yet there is something vaguely noble about his hard-headed persistence. Feeding off his dark energy are some very fine actors, including John Turturro as Mickey’s partner-in-crime and Eddie Marsan as an unsympathetic funeral director. The period detail and setting — the story takes place in the early 1980s — is neatly observed, with grimy shades of beige and grey seeping up through the cracked pavements and rundown housing projects of what appears to be irreversible urban decay. For all the highlights, however, the film is less than the sum of its parts, largely because the extensive subplot involving Jenkins and Hendricks meanders pointlessly away from the main story. That said, God’s Pocket is worth seeing on the strength of Hoffman’s performance alone.
