Roskam: The Drop (2014)

Even if The Drop weren’t James Gandolfini’s final film, it would still feel a bit like an elegy for The Sopranos, or at least feel as if it were continuing The Sopranos’ own elegiac attitude towards Italian-American mob communities. Based on one of the few novels by Dennis Lehane that’s set outside of Boston, it’s about a pair of small-time Brooklyn mafiosi, played by Gandolfini and Tom Hardy, who run a bar that functions as a drop point for a much wider, more powerful and more amorphous Russian crime conglomerate. Most of the film takes place in and around the bar, which is as cosy, comforting and communal as you might imagine, full of juicy local textures and as distinct from the adjoining neighborhoods as one regionalist palette is from another. However, over the course of the film, Michael R. Roskam gradually and subliminally erodes that sense of place and community, peeling it back until the mise-en-scene feels less and less retro, more and more like the present. What starts off as a staunchly local drama is gradually dislocated from its locale, just as anything resembling local identity, community and geography is progressively leached out of Roskam’s mise-en-scene, which moves towards increasingly anonymous, abstracted spaces – often shot at night in bewildering sodium tints – or local spaces that feel well and truly abandoned by anything resembling community. By the end, it feels as if there’s nothing left outside this quaint simulacrum of a bar but a blinding sheet of white light, the end-point of a gradual deterioration and decay of everything homely or comforting about the film’s atmosphere that often makes it feel more like a mystery than a thriller, less interested in plot points or twists than a gradual, dawning awareness that nothing in this cosy community is quite as it appears to be. As might be expected, those moments tend to constellate around the drops themselves, which are presented as so many disruptions in the neighborhood’s space-time continuum, envoys from a totally different regime of accumulation and exchange. And for all the plenitude of shows and films that are anxious to tap into what it means to live in New York now, none have come so close as this dawning sense of discontinuity, this awareness of a hyper-stylised neighborhood dissembling something unspeakable all around you, as Roskam evokes a city whose zeitgeist consists of nothing more nor less than searching for a zeitgeist, trying to hold on to a semblance of local specificity that vanishes into thin air as soon as you touch it.