This time, an opportunity to look at two very different independent films that between them hit the two extreme points that essentially all independent films lie between: talky relationship dramas, and Tarantino knock-offs.
Kidnappings never go smoothly in the movies, of course, and the complication that sets in here comes after Kevin and Ben bring the girl back to an old warehouse to wait for the money. Kevin, you see, desires to break his cycle of petty and major crimes, and as he and Kim get to chatting, he finds that he’d rather keep her safe than hold her for ransom. The hotheaded Ben finds this entirely unacceptable, which becomes a major problem when their mysterious ringleader starts encouraging him to kill Kevin and Kim if something goes wrong. Maybe even if it doesn’t.
The script is boilerplate, obviously, but Cecil’s talent as a director far outstrips his weaknesses as a writer. Clocking in at a tight 84 minutes, Hell’s Gate seems even shorter; even though most of the action takes place in one budget-friendly set, the pacing never lags for a second. The editing is punchy without being frantic, and while the film’s most obvious Tarantino lift – its fragmented structure, running back and forth between the first and last days of the crime – makes virtually no narrative sense, it’s a good trick to keep the audience just confused enough to keep guessing what’s going on.
As far as the acting goes, Faherty gives an unusually great performance for a microbudget flick. It’s not entirely clear what makes Kevin start to soften towards his victim, but Faherty’s sullen body language and quiet voice give us a handy explanation: he’s nothing but an old romantic softie, driven to crime by necessity. There’s no conspicuous “acting” going on here, which is a blessed relief. On the other hand, Cohen seems to be “acting” all of the time, and this actually works itself: though I’m not sure it was intentional, Cohen makes Ben seem like a random schmuck trying to act like the guys he sees in movies, rather than a hardened criminal, lending his character a pathetic depth otherwise lacking. The other two members of the cast, unfortunately, aren’t so appealing: Miller has obvious problems with some of her dialogue and never quite gets past the “ditzy blonde” level of characterisation, while Alexandro-Evans is simply not that intimidating, and his British accent is one of the wobbliest things I’ve ever heard.
It is cheap, so it looks cheap, but Hell’s Gate works far better than the vast majority of microbudget crime films, even if it does ask us to swallow some heavily dubious premises (the kidnappers are way too happy to let the victim see their faces, for starters). Still, it’s too fleet of foot for us to dwell on any of that for very long, and Cecil has certainly proven that he’s got an eye for filmmaking much better than so many of his indie colleagues.
Writing out everyone in the film and explaining their relationships would take most of the review; in true sub-Altman fashion, everyone turns out to have some degree of connection to everyone else, although to the film’s immense credit, most of this does not come across as contrived. Let us instead say that pretty much every wrinkle that you or I or writer-director Kate Gorman could imagine gets thrown out there, from bored middle-aged couples to gay swingers to young flirts, with an unexpected but mostly successful diversion into the problems in mother-daughter relationships.
To be completely honest, I was only moderately successful in keeping everyone straight throughout the course of the film: the characters have a tendency to think and talk in mostly the same ways, and none of the actors (mostly TV veterans, like the director) are so particularly great that the really stand out in your mind. It blunts some of the film’s impact to have sometimes incompatible lessons learned by figures that you can’t quite distinguish from each other, and without question Gorman’s greatest failure is her inability to come up with truly rounded characters to support what are, by and large, fairly engaging domestic vignettes.
As a technical endeavor, Five Moments is competent – surprisingly so, perhaps, given what often passes for “competence” in this arena – but flat. I mentioned that Gorman has a history in television; it’s impossible to ignore. Virtually every moment of the film is shot in the sterile manner of a sitcom, and I grew increaingly anxious for anything that wasn’t a two-shot or shot-reverse shot series. At 91 minutes, the film is hardly “long”, but with nothing to change things up it begins to drag before it gets very far. Moreover – and this is the sort of thing you’re only suppose to mention when it’s really bad – the score is horrid. Full of smooth brass that would better suit a Cinemax movie than a thoughtful film about anything, the music is almost unquestionably the most destructive element of the movie, constantly tearing us away from the action and raising the question of when, exactly, the strippers arrive (they don’t, though there is a shower scene, which has the muic and moaning to sound much pornier than it looks).
There’s almost certainly a good film in here somewhere, and it’s clear that Gorman is a capable writer. She’s not even a bad director, just a very impersonal one. There just needed to be a little more time spend in the early stages of this film, making sure the characters worked and the actors had a good handle on what they were doing, and then maybe Five Moments could have actually been the smart exploration of how relationships die that it wants to be.