God's Pocket (2014)

Directed by: John Slattery
Country: USA

Movie Review: The lives of a group of inhabitants from a neighborhood called God’s Pocket are depicted in the debut film from the actor-turned-director, John Slattery, who co-wrote with Alex Metcalf, based on Pete Dexter’s 1983 novel. Even with a set of magnificent actors, such as Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Turturro, Richard Jenkins, Eddie Marsan, and Christina Hendricks, “God’s Pocket” stubbornly varies between impenetrable and dull moments, becoming a shallow exercise on crime and a dispassionate attempt of giving shape to its miserable characters. The story follows Mickey (Hoffman) who tries to deal with the death of his racist stepson in his own way. By burying his body, he tries to hide the news from everybody without success. This is just another problem to add to his marital worries and future debts. Richard Shellburn (Jenkins), a newspaper journalist is the one who investigates the case and keeps writing about the reputation of the people. The film never attains what pretended, and for most of the time remains protracted, uneventful, and throwing out dispensable dialogues. All of a sudden, in one or two occasions, there are burst of gratuitous violence that just worsens the contrived, sometimes impenetrable, and non-atmospheric story. It’s basically a sum of unpleasant episodes that are vaguely connected, and for which I couldn’t feel many positive things. Surprising? Yes, but in a negative way. The quality of these actors was wasted, and that was the biggest surprise for me, since I expected much more from this frustrating American drama.