Brian DeCubellis’ feature debut, Manhattan Night, is a run-of-the-mill noir with a handful of well-executed Steadicam long takes and a troubling volume of issues regarding plot and intent. Ultimately, it is a cynical, regressive and inconsistent work whose scattered aesthetic virtues are insufficient to balance its troubling characteristics.
Manhattan Night is the story of Porter Wren (Adrien Brody), a columnist with a penchant for feel-good human interest fluff pieces. The film commences with a tiresome barrage of not-funny barbs targeting the demise of newspapers, many of them delivered by Wren himself via voiceover. Fortunately, but puzzlingly, both the jokes and the voiceover dissipate quickly, after Wren introduces and professes his love for his family and home.
The plot is centered on Wren’s downfall, personally and professionally. This results from his infatuation with Caroline Crowley (Yvonne Strahovski), whose feminine charms easily convince him to betray his wife and children and to neglect the duties of his journalism job. Crowley’s husband, an enigmatic filmmaker, was found dead a few months previously and she would like the talented Wren to investigate the death. Through clumsy foreshadowing that may as well have been a neon-lighted billboard, Wren’s newspaper’s new owners are also revealed to have been involved in the filmmaker’s death.
This establishes a classic noir narrative and the film unfolds with the sort of thrills and reveals typical of the genre. It delivers on many counts here. The nighttime settings are sufficiently dingy and foreboding, Strahovski makes a charismatic and devious femme fatale, Brody broods capably as anti-hero and the sense of danger and mystery are maintained throughout, albeit the setting never feels truly menacing and the mystery does not reach the level of being genuinely enthralling. In fact, the resolution of the filmmaker’s death is hardly climactic and not remotely shocking. Certainly the best feature of the film is a series of long tracking shots following Wren around his environment as he searches for answers.
Manhattan Night has some issues. The less important of its problems involve the dearth of excitement in the plot and the nonsensical sense of setting. The film needs to be set in 2016 for print journalism to be on hard times, but DeCubellis also needs Manhattan to be a crime-ridden and frightening place, like it was in the early 1980s. Criminality and the likelihood of being the victim of brutes hang over the script, but post-Giuliani Manhattan cannot support such contrivances.
The really glaring issue with the film, however, is that it is socially regressive. Wren’s “journalism” reduces the poor, the victimized and the down-on-their-luck of New York to being exhibits in a human zoo, to be gawked at by Wren and his readers—and the film’s viewers. Wren’s wife is a plot convenience rather than a person. The chief villain of the plot is a caricature of Rupert Murdoch whose villainy is explained by an attack he suffered that left him physically deformed. Is the viewer to suppose that media conglomerates have been neutered as socially-critical institutions because their operators have been literally neutered? The deleterious impact of surveillance is another underdeveloped theme of the film, but, like all the other problems hinted at here, it is reduced to personal vice rather than a systemic crisis. The problems emphasized in the film are explained as the machinations of twisted individuals rather than a foundational aspect of the very structures of 21st century society.
Perhaps most troubling about Manhattan Night is that the cynical opportunism surrounding its creation is itself emblematic of the systemic issues it so carefully avoids critiquing. The economics of filmmaking require directors, particularly middle-aged debutants like DeCubellis, to go through marketing acrobatics in order to fund their work. Because of this, Manhattan Night blatantly calls back to recent Oscar-conversation films to make itself a viable project. It is the story of a fallen nocturnal journalist (Nightcrawler), is based on a popular crime novel with a blonde protagonist (Gone Girl) and seeks to support print journalism in a world that has marginalized it (Spotlight). Further evidence that DeCubellis’ allusions to these recently successful films is a bald endeavor towards procuring funding is that many of the callbacks, particularly to Spotlight, take place through Brody’s voiceover narration, suggesting they were added to the film in post-production. Tellingly, they also feature prominently in the trailer. It is disappointing that a film afraid to blame the nefarious market forces and structural inequalities of contemporary neoliberal capitalism for the social problems it highlights has itself been deformed by those very market forces and inequalities.
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