Recovery and detection in twelve uneasy steps

When we first meet Scudder (Liam Neeson) it’s 1991. Back then he was NYPD, with dyed moustache and goatee. He drinks a breakfast of coffee and two shots of whiskey in a bar that gets robbed. The robbers ice the barkeep. Scudder chases them down and disposes of them one at a time with a remarkably steady hand. There’s more to this part of the story but we don’t learn about it until later, when it’s 1999, Scudder’s handed in his badge, started up as an un-licenced private detective, given up booze and shaved off the ’stache and goatee, that combo having migrated to the faces of several heavies, among them millionaire criminal Kenny Kristo (Dan Stevens) and sadistic sociopathic serial killer Albert (Adam David Thompson). The 90s were difficult years for facial hair legitimacy. 

Yet, if A Walk Among the Tombstones is anything to go by, they were good years for literacy rates. This film, based on a 1992 novel by Lawrence Block, features a drug lord who chills on the sofa with some Nabokov, a homeless boy who hangs out in libraries and is well versed in his Dashiell Hammett, a cemetery groundskeeper toiling away at a novel, and another drug lord who names his dog Watson, no doubt in honour of Arthur Conan Doyle’s beloved narrator. I’m poking fun, but the truth is that it’s a perfectly pleasant conceit in a perfectly watchable, if gruesome, detective yarn, whose narrative style, for the record, is modelled most closely after Raymond Chandler: like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Scudder is usually one step ahead of us and rarely stops to explain what he’s doing. Like Marlowe, Scudder is also something of a romantic. Though evidence of the internet’s usefulness in detection is made obvious to him, Scudder, perhaps buying into the Y2K hype creeping into every third scene, is a devout technophobe, preferring old school methods. Besides, early on in Tombstones Scudder befriends and quasi-deputizes TJ (Astro), the aforementioned homeless child bookworm who knows his way around a search engine and helps save the day, not to mention his own skin, by dint of his early adoption of the mobile phone. 

The plot is about as complicated as gruesome detective yarn plots tend to be, but, in short, it involves a series of kidnappings of the loved ones of affluent criminal kingpins who, for the usual reasons, don’t want to go to the cops—so they go to Scudder, who doggedly tracks down the culprits between AA meetings, which come to assume a curiously ominous tone during the film’s protracted climax, which employs a liturgical reading of the 12 steps as a sort of underscoring for much bloodletting and comeuppance. This is veteran screenwriter Scott Frank’s second feature as director and he plays it fairly straight, though you get the impression he wishes the setting was 1979 instead of 1999, or that he was actually making the film in 1974 instead of 2014. Shades of William Friedkin loom. There are worse shadows you could huddle under for two hours.

                            

A Prophet: visions of sheer survival

This one could also have been called An Education, and if it were its title would have resonated with somewhat more bracing immediacy than its respectable yet less relevant fellow Oscar contender. A Prophet is a prison movie, and as such is inherently concerned with the acquisition of knowledge, codes, and hierarchies. 19-year-old Malik (Tahar Rahim) gets six years for assaulting an officer. An Arab in France with no family or resources, he begins his sentence with little more than the raggedy clothes on his back, a capacity for brawling, and a lot of fear, anger, and confusion. He fits in neither with the religiously observant Muslims nor the Arab-hating Corsicans, but it's the Corsicans who find use for him. He’ll quickly learn through a series of fumbling trails-by-fire to seduce, murder, take shit from his oppressors, and nurture secret plans for his own advancement. Just as importantly, he also learns to read, encouraged by the first man he kills, a fellow Arab named Rayib, who comes to haunt Malik’s waking dreams.

So part of this ambitious crime drama’s icy thrills come from our privileged ability to watch and listen while Malik is administers tough lessons. We aren’t necessarily encouraged to sympathize with Malik, and we certainly aren’t encouraged to pity him or shrug off his actions. Rahim gives a marvelous performance, a punk kid with a wispy moustache, alternately terrified and cocksure, stupidly reckless and suddenly wised-up, but he’s not what we typically call a magnetic presence, neither ingratiating nor glamorous nor obviously charismatic. What makes Rahim’s Malik so riveting is the honesty of the actor’s work and the complexity of character’s plight, which is thorny enough on a political, racial or religious level, yet finally grips us on a more basic, human one. The movie’s title is in fact the right one, mysterious in the best way, alluding perhaps to some trace of second-sight that might keep Malik alive, as well as to some vague sense that somewhere some unseen hand has already decided our fate for us.

A Prophet was directed by Jacques Audiard, whose previous work includes The Beat My Heart Skipped, an imaginative remake of James Toback’s cult film Fingers, and Read My Lips, a superb neo-Hitchcockian thriller. He wrote the screenplay with Thomas Bidegain, based on an original script by Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit, and the result feels busy yet seamless. The movie pounces sometimes like a vicious feline, staying close to its troubled protagonist, at others it comes to a halt to allow us to absorb the gravity of its violence, which is in some strange way a portrait of a new Europe.