The title of Peter Yates’ The Friends of
Eddie Coyle subtly points to the film's structuring displacement – it identifies Eddie as its central point, played by its biggest star by far
(Robert Mitchum), but concerns itself as much with the chains of connection
around him, to the point that Eddie ultimately becomes more notable as absence
than presence. He’s a habitual criminal, looking to avoid pending prison time, even
at the cost of giving people up to the police – first the ones he doesn’t care
about, and then even those he does - but his view of the big picture, and of his
own place within it, is fatally limited. The film is populated with risk-aware characters
trying to shore up their positions, posturing and pushing others around, but often
still misjudging the real threats – it’s full of subtly tragic ironies and
inter-dependencies. But if the constant transacting of guns and information
almost verges at times on self-contained abstraction, the film provides
sufficient evidence of the brutal tangibility with which this activity intersects with the
real world, depicting a series of bank robberies (carried out with guns
channeled through Eddie) in forensic detail. The film’s audaciously desolate climactic
stretch has Eddie failing in his final play, and gradually fading from the
movie and from life itself, becoming drunk and incoherent and lost in a hockey
game crowd, his subsequent death shown with chilling offhandedness, treated
largely just as a training exercise between experienced and novice killers; in
the final low-key scene between two of those “friends,” his death is barely even
worth dwelling on. Mitchum is ideally cast, allowed a rare opportunity to evoke
a life and a history that don't run out at the edges of the frame, his wife
and kids briefly but astutely depicted, marooned outside the community of
“friends” that wearily propels his fate.
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