Police state

Cop Land shows guts

by Peter Keough

Written and directed by James Mangold. With Sylvester Stallone, Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Harvey Keitel, Peter Berg, Janeane Garofalo, Robert Patrick, Michael Rapaport, Annabella Sciorra, and Cathy Moriarty. A Miramax Films release. Opens Friday at the Opera House, Showcase, Tri-Boro, and Woonsocket cinemas.

Given the specimens that reside in the tiny New Jersey suburb of which he's sheriff, it's hard to figure why Freddy Heflin (Sylvester Stallone), the rum-dum hero of James Mangold's Cop Land, would even want to associate with members of the NYPD, let alone dream of becoming one of them. Heavy-drinking, crude, abusive, racist, misogynistic, their beer guts girded by untucked polyester shirts, they are a noisome, primitive fraternity flaunting the worst traits of manhood. Both the simplistic dream and the complex, sordid reality come through with respect and clarity in Mangold's second film (after his compelling debut with Heavy), which is a credit to his sensitivity to the souls of ordinary people and the twisted skeins of relationships that hold a community together and tear it apart. With one of the most powerful casts of the year, Cop Land, like the classic Westerns it's based on, is a microcosm of the strengths, weaknesses, illusions, and certitudes that make up our society.

Not that film is without its lapses. Its premise creaks with melodramatic contrivance. As we see in dewy flashback, years ago Freddy's hopes of being a cop took a dive when he rescued high-school crush Liz (Annabella Sciorra) from a submerged car, destroying the hearing in one ear in the process. As a consolation Ray Donlan (Harvey Keitel -- will he ever play a good lieutenant again?), head of the contingent of New York policemen whose presence gives the town of Garrison, New Jersey, the nickname of the film's title, gets Freddy the job of local sheriff. And so the years pass, with Liz marrying boozy man in blue Joey Randone (Peter Berg), and Freddy putting on the pounds as he breaks up fights between grade-schoolers, or pops parking meters for quarters to play video games, or gazes across the river at the city he'll never serve and protect. For him, being a cop is all doughnuts.

That river plays a heavy symbolic role in Cop Land, serving as a division between the savage urban nightmare and the kitschy pastoral idylls of the police enclave in Garrison. The latter is violated when officer Murray Babitch (Michael Rapaport), nicknamed "Superboy" for rescuing black children from a fire, gets sideswiped on the George Washington Bridge on the way home from a party. He goes in pursuit and ends up killing two unarmed black men. When his pals from the force show up and botch an attempt to plant a gun, Babitch disappears -- apparently in a suicide jump off the bridge.

In comes Internal Affairs investigator Moe Tilden (a greasily note-perfect Robert De Niro in his worst haircut since The King of Comedy), who for some time has been searching for the loose thread that will unravel what he suspects is a network of corruption and abuse of power between Donlan and the mob. In a scene eerily paralleling the circumstances of the two actors themselves, Tilden tempts Freddy to become a "real cop" by turning on the men he idolizes and redeeming his stagnant life of rescuing cats and deluding himself. Hesitant, fearful, self-contemptuous, and sad, Freddy begins his stumbling journey to find something genuine and brave within himself.

So does Stallone as an actor. At first the sight of the former hardbody looking like a tent in the wind in his overflowing khaki uniform makes moot the question of whether he can act. Once the shock wears off, however, an aura of pathos is palpable, the defeated air of diminished expectations that can be seen in his splay-toed gait, the half-smile of shrugged-off despair, the stoic gaze of the aging child who has been beaten before and will be beaten again.

It's an arresting, if not brilliant performance. At times Stallone seems to confuse hard of thinking with hard of hearing. And his reliance on body image and mannerism shows up in his scenes with De Niro. Stallone's acting seems especially limited when compared to that of Ray Liotta, who plays burnt-out, embittered narcotics officer Gary Figgis, a former hotshot crony of Donlan now on the outs because of his troubled conscience and his taste for controlled substances. Freddy's one friend among the cop community, Figgis is nearly as fat as he is (Liotta demonstrates how weight gain can be incorporated into a performance, not replace it) and his speedy non-sequitur rap, his zesty nihilism, and his host of conflicting demons bounce nicely off Freddy's stolidity. It's Liotta's best role since Something Wild, and when the final showdown comes to Cop Land, it reveals who are the real cops and who are the real actors.

---

Sly weighs in

---

Peter Keough can be reached at pkeough[a]phx.com.