with Robert DeNiro, Sylvester Stallone, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Michael Rapaport, Janeane Garofalo, Anabella Sciorra, Peter Berg, Cathy Moriarty
Written and Directed by James Mangold (Miramax)
by William Ham
Cop Land is a densely-plotted crime drama encompassing grand themes of corruption, lost opportunities, infidelity, drug abuse, heroism and ethics, somehow managing to compress them all into something surprisingly modest and well-calibrated. But nobody cares. What we’ve really come to see is walking action figure Sylvester Stallone try to cross over into the heavyweight acting division quite literally, by porking up to the size of a giant squid and reinventing himself as a flawed, lumbering slab of big-lug humanity. This is what actors do when they want to zing the critics and wow cinemaphiles everywhere with their impressive dedication to their craft, and it’s a tall (or, more accurately, wide) order.
The most obvious antecedent is the excess poundage that helped snag Robert DeNiro an Oscar in Raging Bull, a comparison you’re not allowed to miss because both DeNiro and Cathy Moriarty are in this picture (although DeNiro looks far more like an older, rehabilitated version of Rupert Pupkin from The King of Comedy with the dreadful haircut he has to labor under here), but going the extra mile for attention is a time-honored tradition for the desperate thespian. Val Kilmer did it to capture Jim Morrison’s Salamander King period in The Doors, vaulting him from pretty-boy teen-movie actor to the royal pain in the ass he is today. And Orson Welles gradually bulked himself up over several decades to give him the proper air of authority to increase the sales of Paul Masson wine. But any extreme act will suffice – consider Nicolas Cage getting a tooth pulled to play a traumatized vet in Birdy, eating a live cockroach in Vampire’s Kiss, or wearing a spare set of Martha Raye’s false teeth and squirting the leftover adhesive up his nose for Peggy Sue Got Married. So it assuredly didn’t take much rumination for Stallone to decide that metamorphasizing into a lugubrious lump was the quickest ticket to renewed respectability.
Writer/director James Mangold obviously didn’t want to take any chances, so not only is Stallone’s Freddy Heflin, the sheriff of a small New Jersey town populated by crooked New York cops, a badge-wearing slug, but he’s also deaf in one ear from a heroic rescue that lost him both his NYPD dreams and the only girl (Annabella Sciorra) he ever loved, and he totals his prowler in the first ten minutes and has to spend the rest of the film with a nasty gash across the bridge of his nose. This is called overplaying your hand, and it’d be ridiculous if Stallone weren’t so successful at embodying a defeated heap. His heavy eyes and thickened speech work to an advantage he hasn’t exploited since the original Rocky – he’s a decent but very tired man, and he makes you understand why he’s resigned himself to playing glorified mascot to a bunch of arrogant big-city cops.
But all that changes when one of them, Murray Babitch (Michael Rapaport), nicknamed “Superboy” for a heroic rescue of his own, accidentally kills two unarmed blacks who sideswipe his car. To cover it up, slimy Jack Rucker (Robert Patrick looking like Rick Dees with a bad mustache) tries unsuccessfully to plant a gun in the victims’ car, and bad lieutenant Ray Donlan (Harvey Keitel? Playing a crooked cop? Geddouttahere…) takes advantage of the confusion to make as if a remorseful Superboy jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge. Nobody buys it, but everyone plays along anyway – everyone, that is, except Moe Tilden (DeNiro), a crusading Internal Affairs officer who seizes the opportunity to blow the tangled web of blue-suited deceit apart by challenging the loyalties and appealing to the ideals of the last untainted cop in town.
The whole scenario seems primed for explosion already – there are enough subplots and complications in Cop Land to feed an entire season’s worth of TV police dramas. Heflin’s long-lost love is now married to hot-shot piglet Joey Randone (Peter Berg), who is sleeping with Donlan’s wife Rose (Moriarty), who catches wind of her husband’s plot to destroy the evidence (Superboy) when the net starts closing in on them, etc. The whole mess could easily have been overplayed as (c)opera, especially considering the almost absurd array of talent Mangold corralled for the film. But the overstatement stops at Stallone’s physical appearance. Like Mangold’s debut, Heavy (which utilized longer stretches of silence than a Jim Jarmusch adaptation of a Beckett play), wordless glances and wistful gazes do the bulk of the exposition for him. This is bound to disappoint audiences conditioned to expect star turns, post-Tarantino verbal pyrotechnics, and distancing comedic distractions, but it’s absolutely the correct approach to a world where allegiance equals secrecy.
The performers take this challenge and run with it. DeNiro shrewdly wrings the most out of his smaller scenes, and it’s always a kick to see him sharing the screen with Keitel (especially since their last collaboration, in Uli Grossbard’s Falling In Love, consisted of them acting like normal guys and therefore creeped the hell out of me). Moriarty, Sciorra, and Janeane Garofalo all carve full-bodied characters out of a minimum of screen time. However, like going to Pulp Fiction to see Travolta dance and coming out praising Samuel L. Jackson, it’s Ray Liotta, in the pivotal role as the force’s coked-up outsider, who steals the picture, giving his most electric performance since Something Wild. Stallone may be hell-bent on proving himself a real actor, and he acquits himself admirably, but the real redemption in Cop Land lies in knowing that Ray can finally send that Operation Dumbo Drop II screenplay back to his agent with a smile and a “no thanks.”
