Cinema Tuesdays Review

One of the most interesting things about the DVD phenomenon is the way movie directors can, with the studio's blessing, revisit their past work to issue a "Director's Cut." James Mangold's "Cop Land" was drastically cut before its initial release in August, 1997. According to Peter Biskind's book Down and Dirty Pictures, test screenings for the Sylvester Stallone-starring film were disastrous, as audiences filled with Stallone fans were confused when "Rocky" didn't just "pick up a gun and shoot the bad guy," as the star put it. Instead, Stallone's character spends much of the film in paralysis, caught between differing ideas of the "right thing to do." Biskind writes: "[Cop Land] scored in the low 40s. Harvey [Weinstein, head of Miramax] was ashen. Mangold continues, 'The movie was written in my mind to play to a much more select audience than it suddenly was playing to.'"

Out came the scissors, and after much arguing and wrangling, fifteen minutes were cut from the film, presumably to speed it up and make it play more like an action picture. In fact, Mangold's intentions were very different.

A funny thing happened as I watched the recent DVD release of "Cop Land," which restores 15 minutes originally cut from the film. As the film moved inexorably toward its climactic showdown scene, I noticed a couple of shots of a clock on the wall, and mentally noted, "huh… like 'High Noon.'" Only in "Cop Land," the showdown takes place at 6 a.m.

In fact, Mangold did intend "Cop Land" to be kind of an Urban Western. A short "making-of" documentary on the DVD reveals as much, as does the very informative and enlightening commentary track (featuring director Mangold, along with producer Cathy Konrad, and actors Sylvester Stallone and Robert Patrick).

Stallone plays Freddy Heflin (the name a reference to the Western actor Van Heflin), sheriff of Garrison, New Jersey, a small town just over the river from New York. He's never been able to make it as an NYPD cop because of deafness in one ear from a childhood incident. The town is seemingly populated entirely by big-city police officers and their families. And as is slowly revealed in the film, some ugly doings are taking place beneath the peaceful façade of Garrison. Robert De Niro plays an investigator from NYPD Internal Affairs who tries to sniff out the wrong doings, and at the same time, get Stallone's Sheriff Heflin to finally come out of his shell and take action against the bad cops living in the town, right under his nose.

There's fine acting all around from Stallone, De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Robert Patrick, and Anabella Sciorra, but the first 45 minutes of the film, even in this Director's Cut, are a bit disjointed. Only in the second half of the film, where much of the material from the film was cut before its theatrical release, does the story start to slowly simmer. This being a deliberately paced Urban Western, it takes a while longer for things to reach the boiling point. Only then does the film begin to take on that "mythic" quality that characterizes the best Westerns. Too bad Dimitri Tiomkin isn't around any more. Composer Howard Shore's music is serviceable, but Tiomkin's noble strains could have elevated "Cop Land" even higher.

6/10/04

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