7 | / 10 |
Users | 4.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.8 |
An ex-con attempts to blend into his new surroundings in an Indiana town, but is haunted by a figure from his past.
Starring: Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson, Casey Affleck, Forest Whitaker, Willem DafoeCrime | 100% |
Thriller | Insignificant |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
UV digital copy
Region A (locked)
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
There’s a certain melancholy to a lot of country music that seemed to make Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart redolent with a kind of ragged sensibility that was perhaps best summed up by the title of its Academy Award winning song, “The Weary Kind”. There’s a different kind of sadness running rampant in Cooper’s latest, the dour but often compelling Out of the Furnace, a film that in lesser hands might have been more of a straight ahead revenge thriller without much to recommend it other than a visceral killing or two. The revenge aspect of Out of the Furnace almost plays out as a tangent here, though, for there’s a deeper tack that Cooper ends up exploiting, a penetrating examination of lives with no hope for a better future, but with an innate nobility nonetheless. That nobility is weathered, though, filled with the scuffs and scars of experiences that seem to echo some perverse mantra of “life isn’t fair”. While the film really concentrates on the travails of hardscrabble steel mill worker Russell Baze (Christian Bale), the film’s dark, moody ambience is established from virtually the first moment with a modern day update of the iconic scene with Jimmy Cagney and Mae Clark in The Public Enemy, only in this instance we’re dealing with a much more dangerously sociopathic criminal named Harlan (Woody Harrelson) , a character who isn’t about to punish his nemeses with something as relatively harmless as a grapefruit. It’s a startling opening scene, one which assault the viewer with virtually as much force as Harlan assaults his perceived antagonists in the film, and it quickly creates a stifling mood of terror and impending doom. That mood was palpable enough to actually foster a lawsuit filed by a group of plaintiffs who share a surname with Harlan's character and who claim the film maliciously maligns not just their name but their ethnic heritage (the plaintiffs are part of a recently state recognized Native American tribe which has yet to receive Federal designation).
Out of the Furnace is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. As befits its sad and melancholic tale, this is a frequently very dark film, filled with looming shadows and an overall fairly oppressive ambience. Cooper and his cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi do not artificially brighten any of these sequences, and so there is an intentional drabness and at times lack of depth running rampant through this film, especially in such notable scenes as when Russell and his buddy Dan find the backwoods house that Harlan lives in with his relatives. Even some exterior shots are gray, almost monochromatic, and filled with threatening clouds mixed with the effluent from the steel mills. All of this said, this is a commendably organic presentation and does actually offer pretty robust color when the characters are outside in the sunshine (admittedly an infrequent occurrence). Fine detail is excellent in the many close-ups, as several of the screenshots accompanying this review show. The image is clear and stable, and suffers from no artifacts. Despite the rather shaded appearance of much of the film, contrast is exceptionally strong and shadow detail is actually surprisingly good most of the time (see screenshot 6 for a good example).
Out of the Furnace's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 has several things going for it, one of which is the very smart use of source cues (something Cooper talks about in one of the supplements on this Blu-ray). All of these utilize the surround channels very capably. The film also is quite nuanced in its ambient environmental effects, nicely detailing things like crickets chirping (the first thing you hear in the film, which is soon belied by the industrial setting). Dialogue is very cleanly presented, and the fight scenes offer some excellent immersion with some literally bone crunching foley effects.
My colleague Brian Orndorf evidently like Out of the Furnace a bit more than I did, and so for those who might want a second opinion, I refer you to Brian's review. There's no denying the gritty honesty of this film, at least with regard to Russell's character, but so much horrible stuff happens to the poor guy that you almost feel like he's wandered in from a bus and truck version of The Book of Job. While Harrelson's Harlan is a truly unforgettable character, he's so hyperbolic that he almost seems ported in from some ultra-dramatic entity featuring a version of Snidely Whiplash, albeit a backwoods iteration. The screenplay gets a lot of the dialogue just right, and the feel of the blue collar working class folks is also laudable, but this is one big downer from start to finish. The technical aspects of the disc are first rate, and despite my foregoing caveats, for those who like the cast, Out of the Furnace comes Recommended.
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