Ray Pride

Blood, guts, bullets and octane, indeed.

32-year-old Joe Carnahan's first feature with a budget brings a dank greasy grunge to a cop morality tale that seeps into the soul and chills it. I can't think of a frame or bit of behavior or detail we're asked to focus on that isn't ideally calibrated. Nick Tellis (Jason Patric) is a suspended undercover officer who's brought back to solve a murder of a young officer killed in the line of duty. Henry Oak (Ray Liotta), the slain man's partner, is out for revenge, and Liotta's bulked-up, goateed, renegade form portends to cross any line. While set in Detroit, the Toronto-shot "Narc" seems to take place in a clammy fever dream, tightening the screws on urban thrillers of the seventies like "Serpico" and "The French Connection," while dipping into the moral ambiguity of movies like "The Thin Blue Line."

"Narc" was completed with piecemeal financing, and distributor Lions Gate Films played it at Sundance 2001. A handful of critics were impressed. But the film could have gone straight to video. "I wasn't confident," Jason Patric says. "After Sundance, actually, I used every chit I had earned in the last fifteen years, trying to get a studio to buy this movie. I wasn't confident that Lions Gate was confident in the movie. There was one person there who believed in it, [Lions Gate Films President] Tom Ortenberg, and the rest, I didn't buy it. So it set me on my way to try to make something happen."

Through the spring, prints of the film circulated through Los Angeles. Long story short, Tom Cruise saw the movie, said he'd do anything to help, and lo and behold, Paramount Pictures is opening "Narc" in 800 theaters under the actor's Cruise/Wagner banner.

Patric thinks the movie has depths that early viewers missed. "The plot is a great plot but it's not really what you're watching. You're watching these characters being stripped down." Still, Tellis deeply loves his wife and baby. "I think the family stuff is stuff you've never seen in a cop movie, the family stuff in cop movies is usually addendum. Those scenes could exist in another movie if you wanted. I think the behavior is what the movie is all about. As an actor, I'm all about behavior. I've said it before, but it's true, I think, most people in movies act like they're in a movie."

How did you do research with real-life narcotics cops? "We had a beer and had some lunch. I think all those technical aspects, because it's such a timeworn drama, you've seen in television. I want it to look right when you go around a doorway, you want the gun to be the right thing, but otherwise, I figure I'm always playing a man, and that's the important thing."

Patric had played a narc before. "Yeah, `Rush' was ten years ago, I was 24 years old. I'm a different man now with different things to show. I'd never had a wife or a child in a movie. I had never had a really tough adversary. I don't work often enough to repeat myself!" He smirks gracefully. "Initially, I talked to Joe and said, I played a narc cop, y'know, a junkie, at one point a long time ago. I really wanted to be involved with a subjective piece of filmmaking, where if he could filmically follow me, style-wise, with the behavior that I wanted to intone, not only would it be a different character, it would make the movie very different than we'd seen. To literally have the audience in the same shoes as this guy is going through it. ["Narc"] starts out like a cannonball, but it's as interesting to watch a man reading files," which Carnahan invests with almost carnal detail. "You see that kind of stuff [in movies]," Patric says, "but when you're [invested in a character] and you realize that's what it's about, that the drama is going to be the nuances and movement of these people, like we have in life with relationships."

The reticent actor has a theory about how cops go sour. "I think they start out at the academy and then they're writing tickets for a couple of years, and y'know, then you want to be a detective. You find the option for working your way up. There's an opening in vice, there's an opening in narc, or you've been assigned. Then your own talents, your deductive talents pull you into something, and they you start rationalizing your behavior, your lifestyle, and just like anything, you look up and you go, where's the last three years gone, who am I now? Y'know, people who are wearing a mask, after a while, you take that off and your face looks like the mask."

Does Patric take the mask home? "I think you can only play parts of yourself. I use different parts of myself, my past, my mind, engaging fears or insecurities that I've had. In this case, the loathing and regret this man carries around with him. When you revisit this stuff, it resonates. That doesn't' mean I don't go home and y'know, have a beer and try to find out where the best strip bar in Toronto is. I mean, that does happen, but [the deeper layers] resonate with you."

"Narc" opens Friday.

(2003-01-08)

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DVD Tip of the Week
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My Big Fat Night
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