Brother Tony Dances

Rating: Null/10 (16 December 2007)

I avoided this for years, because... well because Denzel bothers me. He's probably a nice man. He does a very fine job of projecting a sort of jolly wisdom on screen. But every character and every stroke within that character references this persona. It isn't even him, its his public face. Its the most annoying sort of pseudoacting I know. Unless the movie hinges on this particular and very narrow notion, he fights it.
So we end up with a failed picture with a guy in it that we just have to love, or at least admire. Whether we like it or not, race matters in this, because the type he draws on for that personal origin is that of the wise black uncle. He did choose that face after all. Though Forest Whitaker (for example) is in much the same spot, he's chosen to be a real actor, a different man each time we see him.
So that bias kept me away from this. My loss. Washington really does work here. Its not because he is any different than elsewhere. But because the filmmaker was intelligent enough to know the man's limits and build the movie around them.
And what a construction! Yes, it can be said that Tony also makes the same movie each time. Yes, he uses the same devices each time, striving for the same effect. But he's getting so darned good at it. His dynamic camera is so integrated with his jumping cuts  the most energetic in the business  that while he invented none of it, he surely is the master. I need to go see his TeeVee work on cerebral detectives now. I must.
That camera tension is something worth noting, and why it works. Its because the camera stands in for our eye. If managed well, we accept it as our eye, and when it moves, we accept that we would be and are moving that way. When it slides from a face to an object, we believe that we would have done the same, noticing something that may or may not be important.
We have the running camera here, making us less of a ghostly, gliding observer, but a human running one, panting, eager. SInce Creasy is so cool, it casts us as actually more in the story than he is. The roles are reversed a bit: though he makes things happen, he is the viewer and we are on the street.
Brothers. The Coens. The Quays. The Scotts. Cinematic genius in pairs. I wonder why?
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.