Russell (Christian Bale) is a steel worker who lives in the Rust Belt with
his brother Rodney (Casey Affleck),
an angry young soldier who keeps getting ‘stop lossed’ back into the Iraq
war. Rodney has slipped into perpetual
gambling in between his tours, and has resorted to borrowing money from John
Petty (Willem Defoe), an underground
boxing promoter who uses him in his fights.
One night, Russell visits John to offer
him some money for Rodney’s debt, and on the way home has a car accident and ends
up in jail. When he is eventually
released, Rodney is in deeper than ever and goes missing whilst trying to earn
money in a more dangerous, yet profitable bare-knuckle fighting circuit with
the psychotic Harlan DeGroat (Woody
Harrelson). This leads Russell to
the Northeast to try and find his troubled brother…
The film is essentially a collection of
metaphors that combine to create a damning critique of a bleak 21st
century America.
Russell spends his time at the steel
mill where he proudly works, a location that has many symbolic functions. The rusted, functional architecture is a
visual representation of the traditional American heartland that he feels keeps
the country together; whilst shots of rusted steel, burning furnaces and
billowing smoke towers reinforce the underlying tension and violence of the
story.
There is also a long drawn out set piece
that crosscuts two scenes of Rodney bare-knuckle boxing in the dangerous Jersey
Mountains and Russell hunting deer in the forest – a rather obvious exercise in
simultaneity editing. Someone could make
a good viral video of characters cautiously hunting deer, yet freezing at the
last minute, as the animal looks them in the eye…
The more interesting narrative metaphor
that is made is the similarity between national economic recession and personal
incarceration. Just before Russell goes
to prison he watches Teddy Kennedy endorsing Barack Obama for president on TV
in a bar. When he gets out five years
later, he drives away from the prison building and looks with pain at the
abandoned houses and desolate streets. A
suggestion that working class America has been imprisoned in their poverty for
the past years.
Bale is impressive as the cynical and
dejected Russell and there are many moments where he forces in his pride and
proves his good nature – an attribute that makes the third act even
harsher. Yet this is undoubtedly
Affleck’s film. There is an enthralling
moment where he screams at his brother for not understanding the brutality that
he witnessed in Iraq, which works as an attack on the passive audience as much
as the character of his brother.
Adding to the raging hyper-masculinity
of Fight Club and Snatch, Out Of The Furnace creates a landscape where you either fight for
your life (Affleck) or contain your anger and frustration until boiling point
(Bale). The overall film has a proud
lawlessness that paints a dangerous picture of beltway America, where gangs of
drug dealers and violent rednecks stage brutal boxing matches. In the uneasy time where America is unsure of
its economic future, films like Out Of
The Furnace and The Place Beyond ThePines are powerfully reinforcing the myth of the downfall of heartland
America.
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