God's Pocket

This directorial debut from Mad Men star John Slattery shows he has a real skill of bringing a place to life and pulls terrific low key performances from strong character actors. But God’s Pocket takes an inadvisable left turn halfway through and it never recovers.

Set in the seventies in the titular area (a fictional part of Philadelphia), Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Turturro eke out a living in the meat trade, dabbling in a little crime on the side. Hoffman lives with Christina Hendricks and her no-good, blade-wielding son (a sweaty, unhinged turn from Caleb Landry-Jones) whose antics and constant torment of a quiet old black man at his factory leads to his murder. When his death is passed off as a work accident, a suspicious Hendricks pushes Hoffman to ask his gangster ‘friends’ to see what they can find out…

Slattery has created a real lived in environment and, helped by Pete Dexter’s script (Mulholland Falls, The Paperboy), fills it with characters with a cynical, down-at-heel, small world view. This is the kind of place where one-legged hobos scour bins for the dribbles at the bottom of empties, of paint-chipped banisters, where dishevelled guys have a sure thing in the fifth. One scene sees Hoffman back his meat truck into his drive and lock up, but off in the background, out of earshot, two toughs rough up a kid who pleads for clemency while lying on the street. This is the kind of place where Eddie Marsan’s funeral director gets punched out… at a funeral. As barman Peter Gerety, another underrated character actor, spits: “F**kin’ people.”

Then it all goes wrong. Big time. And most of that is down to Richard Jenkins. Or the character Richard Jenkins plays to be exact. An alcoholic columnist at odds with the neighbourhood over how he portrayed them in a recent article (based on an incident from Dexter’s journalist days), Richard Jenkins follows up on Landry-Jones’ death. Well-read and standing out from the blue collar types, his poetic monologues still don’t sit right and the moment he falls madly in love with Christina Hendricks, God’s Pocket becomes a different film - an exercise in black humour with Weekend At Bernie’s bodies in stolen meat trucks, picnics in the country, gun-toting old ladies and eye-gouging labourers. Same characters, same world, same story, but an entirely different film.

Despite the bad choices in the second half, God’s Pocket does more than suggest there is magic to come from John Slattery.