Tom Hardy, who has proved in recent years that he could be the Bane of Batman’s existence and that he could carry an entire movie alone in a car (this past spring’s inventive Locke), reveals, in The Drop, another compelling facet of his actorly toolbox: the noir patsy.
As Bob Saginowski, a bartender at a New York City watering hole that doubles as a “drop site” for bookmaking and other illegal activities, Hardy sleeps with one weary eye open, aware to the danger that perpetually surrounds him but compartmentalizing himself from its implications. Crime is everywhere, but he “just tends the bar.” He wears a sleepy, hangdog expression throughout most of The Drop, conveying the sense of a man willfully naïve to the racket and therefore as malleable as silly putty to Life’s dark, cosmic plans.
But this is a film in which nothing is at it seems, a gripping neo-noir shaken and stirred, in which the past is a lie, friends can become enemies at the drop of a drop, and the local girl he’s sweet on (Noomi Rapace’s Nadia) may or may not be a femme fatale. It’s a movie that keeps us guessing, imbuing nearly every moment with creeping dread, every benign question with implicit (and illicit) subtext, every street corner with a potential prowler. Credit Belgian director Michael R. Roskam (2011’s Academy Award-nominated Bullhead) for the atmosphere of palpable paranoia, and the screenplay’s twists to Dennis Lehane, expanding his own short story “Animal Rescue” with the same depth of character and lived-in sense of local color he brought to his novels of Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River.
The Drop does, indeed, begin with an animal rescue: On his walk home one night, Bob discovers a battered pit bull puppy crying in a garbage can outside a stranger’s house. It turns out to be the home of Nadia, an unmarried waitress, and the pup is there for a reason. Bob adopts it, which leads him into a mess of trouble with the neighborhood’s friendly local psychopath (Matthias Schoenaerts). This is compounded by Bob’s witnessing a stick-up at the bar and its subsequent investigation by the requisite nosy cop (John Ortiz, playing one of the movie’s few clichés, but playing it well). As all of this drama congeals in a spellbinding climax, as incidental details and dialogue from early in the film assume added heft, rewarding the observant viewer.
Though the film is not without its gallows humor, death becomes an overarching theme of The Drop — its determined avoidance, its unpredictable immediacy, its inevitability. So at the risk of burying the lede any further, if you’ve seen the movie’s trailers, you know that it’s James Gandolfini’s final film role as Marv, the bar’s washed-up manager and half-baked criminal mastermind.
Anyone seeking moments of art imitating life — and, in Gandolfini’s case, anticipating death — don’t need to look very hard. In the very first scene, he chides Bob and the bar’s regulars for rhapsodizing about an old friend’s death. A few scenes later, he has a moving debate with his live-in sister Dottie (Ann Dowd) about whether to remove his ailing father from life support — to finally accept the End. And most poignantly, he tells a hoodlum toward the end of the film that “We’re fuckin’ dead already — we’re just walking around.” If The Sopranos concluded on a question mark, The Drop finds Gandolfini leaving us in an exclamation mark. It’s hard to watch, but it’s the closure we’ve been waiting for.
THE DROP. Director: Michael R. Roskam; Cast: Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, James Gandolfini, Matthias Schoenaerts, John Ortiz, Michael Aronov, Morgan Specter; Distributor: Fox Searchlight; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at most area theaters