In one of his final film roles, a typically rumpled and sympathetic Philip Seymour Hoffman anchors the black comedy “God’s Pocket.”
Making his directorial debut, “Mad Men” star John Slattery expertly navigates the Coen brothers’ terrain by shifting from the mordant to the gruesome in a tale of a community of lowlifes living in a blue-collar quarter of Philadelphia circa 1980.
Hoffman and Slattery’s “Mad Men” colleague Christina Hendricks play the parents of a loutish 23-year-old with a bad habit of threatening people with a straight razor. A fellow construction workers kills the kid for being a racist imbecile and general nuisance, but the workers close ranks by pretending an industrial accident is to blame, an explanation that the Hendricks character properly finds hard to believe.
Soon an alcoholic-but-talented newspaper columnist (Richard Jenkins, superb as usual) and a mobster are on the case, while the Hoffman character and his butcher friend (John Turturro) try to get back to their daily routines of stealing trucks and betting on horses. But the bereaved dad winds up blowing the funeral money on a bet.
Neither over-sentimentalizing nor condescending toward the working-class people in the film, Slattery sees the humanity in his self-defeating and ignorant characters. He coaxes textured and sympathetic performances from all (though the patrician Hendricks seems out of place), and the atmosphere is richly depressing, with spot-on production design that captures the grimy pallor of rubbishy lives.
But it’s the WASPish dialogue and the zany story that take top honors, the plot zig-zagging unpredictably as even minor characters seize the opportunity to reroute the action to the point that the unfortunate deceased youth manages to get killed (sort of) a second time.
You could argue that the film ends with a kind of shrug (a point that could be made about many of the Coen brothers’ films as well), but I like the way things culminate with the working-class men deciding as a unit to blame the messenger who accurately describes them. As for Hoffman, the shambling Everyman naturalism he shows here gives “God’s Pocket” an added elegiac layer that makes its bitter ironies that much more painful.