Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christina Hendricks, Eddie Marsan, John Turturro, Richard Jenkins, Caleb Landry Jones, Jack O’ Connell, Bill Buell, Rebecca King, David Apicella, Bridget Barkan, Michael Drayer, Prudence Wright Holmes, Eddie McGee, Molly Price, Domenick Lombardozzi, Glenn Fleshler, Joseph Reiver, Arthur French, Dave Powers, Morgan Auld, Jonathan Gordon, Matthew Lawler, Joyce Van Patten, Danny Mastrogiorgio, Sophia Takal
All it would have taken is the velvet tones of Richard Burton to have been heard at the start of Philip Seymour’s penultimate film and what the audience would have realised was how encouragingly in the vein of Dylan Thomas screenwriter Alex Metcalf and John Slattery had made Peter Dexter’s novel God’s Pocket.
Whilst not starting exactly at the beginning, God’s Pocket sees the lives of some of the population of the tiny backwater town and in a 21st Century update, violence, extra marital affairs, drunk, burned out journalists, stolen ungraded meat and the very big possibility of the most absurd moments of life thrown in, you could well be staring at the Welsh fishing village of Llareggub from a precariously, near doomed boat.
For the population of God’s Pocket is a microcosm of America and all life anywhere. The most peculiar of events can happen, the most seemingly random actions and incidents are enough to send a life, which was, if not happy, then at least content, spiralling out of control and that no matter how long you may have lived in a place somebody will tell you that your life does not matter as you weren’t really from there.
What the audience is left with is a realisation that in some person, any particular character in the film, you could see your own life being played out. Whether it was the bored mother of Leon Hubbard, a tremendous Christina Hendricks, who somehow gets talked into sleeping with arguably one of the very few American actors whose voice could do Richard Burton justice, a rather superb Richard Jenkins as alcoholic journalist Richard Shellburn, the money grabbing owner of the local funeral parlour Jack Moran who has no compulsion in throwing out a soon to be buried body outside into the rain because payment cannot be paid or even the old black man who finally rises up and turns on the bile aimed at him by the young man who nobody is ever going to miss except his mother, all human life is situated in the confines of God’s Pocket and it is compact, portable and will have anybody watching it unable to turn away from the creation of something compelling.
A sign of a great film is when the cast doesn’t contain one person who is going to steal the film from out of the feet from everybody who appears in, it has to be a true ensemble piece and from Christina Hendricks, the superb John Turturro, the smooth talking Richard Jenkins, the compelling Philip Seymour Hoffman and the undeniably good and unquestionably perfectly cast British actor Eddie Marsan as the Undertaker. The ensemble is all when it comes to a film like this and it works rather well.
To begin at the beginning, everything starts in the realm of God’s Pocket and the only way to survive is to deal with the Devil you know, for unless you truly belong there, you either leave or eat asphalt.
Ian D. Hall