Blood Ties
(USA/France,
127 min.)
Dir.
Guillaume Canet, Writ. Guillaume Canet, James Gray
Starring: Clive Owen, Billy Crudup, Marion Cotillard, Mila
Kunis, James Caan, Lily Taylor, Zoe Saldana, Matthias Schoenaerts
Blood Ties is a
total gong show of terrible acting. It’s shocking to see so many stars turn in
so many unwatchable performances. Something must have been in the water on the
set of Blood Ties because the members
of the usually reliable ensemble all deliver turns that are shockingly terrible.
Even Marion Cotillard doesn’t come off well in this review. What happened?
Canet, working on a script with James Gray (whose The Immigrant sees Cotillard gives the
best performance so far this year), just doesn’t inject any life into this bloated
and boring crime saga. Blood Ties
follows the familiar tropes of the good brother/bad brother and cop/criminal
binaries as Billy Crudup’s Frank struggles to maintain his loyalty to his big
brother Chris (Owen), who is a thug, murderer, and career-criminal extraordinaire.
Blood Ties relies heavily on
conventions that appear in films so frequently that they inevitably play as clichés,
such as the boyhood memory that strives to ripple an emotional undercurrent
through this family saga or the old “turn in your brother or turn in your badge”
ultimatum that Frank receives from his boss.
The only sense of newness to Blood Ties, really, is the unexpectedly low performance by this
high-calibre ensemble. Almost everyone in this New York-set family saga seems
to come from a different New York, for the cast sports an array of indiscernible
accents. The dialogue plays just as awkwardly as intelligibly as much of the
plot does.
The worst offender in the accent department might be the
great Marion Cotillard, who is utterly unplaceable in her role as Frank’s
ex-wife/pimped-out baby mama Monica. Blood
Ties finds most of its entertainment value in trying to guess whether
Cotillard’s accent marks Monica as a native Noo Yawkah, although she speaks
Spanish and (possibly) Italian in the film, yet her accent suggests she’s an
escaped spy from Pottsylvania. Cotillard’s struggle is too bad, since she hits
some of the film’s few credible notes dramatically, although they’re undercut
by the accent that sounds better placed in The
Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.
Cotillard isn’t nearly as bad as Zoe Saldana, however, who
gives the most histrionically unwatchable performance of the film. Blood Ties reeks of overblown
performances that use seeing the Oscar as their greatest motivation, yet the
film is so untamed, unwieldy, and unfocused that none of the players can invest
the audience in their characters.
The actors aren’t solely to blame for Blood Ties, though, since Canet stages the action awkwardly and the
pacing of this crime epic is clumsy and disorienting. Blood Ties evokes the aesthetics of 1970s old-school thrillers to
complement its 1970s setting, but instead of paying homage to bell-bottomed
thrillers like 3 Days of the Condor
with its muted palette and crawling camera, it simply looks dingy and poorly
lit. The sprawling and exhaustingly long—not to mention epically boring—narrative
isn’t helped by the abruptness of the editing, which might be a by-product of
the fact that Blood Ties lost over
seventeen minutes of fat following its premiere at Cannes last year. Still,
though, it’s a slog to follow since everything unfolds like a familiar blur.
The familiarity of Blood
Ties might be inevitable since the film is adapted from not one but two
previous films. It also evokes strong parallels to Gray’s fraternal cop/crook
pic We Own the Night, which itself
plays like an uncredited remake of the fraternal cop/crook Bollywood pic Deewar. Blood Ties has been done and before it’s been done much better.
Blood Ties is currently available on home video.
