Left Field Cinema

Four young men living in the titular Gravesend, New York, are caught up in multiple murders and petty crime on a Saturday night and slowly begin turning against each other. The films tagline summarises the film as: “4 Kids, 3 Bodies, 2 fights, 1 Night, No Shit”, although arguably all of the numerical values are inaccurate except the “1 Night” this punchy summary does capture the flavour of Salvatore Stabile’s directorial debut quite well. Remarkably Stabile was only 19-years old at the time of filming and was little more than a “kid” himself. His youth effected his approach (he breaks many basic film making rules, and although such rule breaking might be a result of inexperience they come across as fresh approaches rather than sheer incompetence) and his affection for his home New York and in particular Coney Island make the film a very personal experience with an unvarnished sense of realism rarely captured so successfully on film. Gravesend is another world with its own set of rules, where violence is a way of life and children are sent into the world to fend for themselves. In many respects it is a tale of wasted youth, each of our four main characters are either victims of negligent parents or have no parents at all, although they hang around with each other they are not what most of us would commonly consider ‘friends’, constantly abusing each other verbally or physically, their group seems to have formed from a mutual need for protection rather than kinship or common values. In short: they each need the others to back them up in this most predatory of environments. The superficial nature of their relationships is exposed as the story develops as individually they start to question the wisdom of the groups actions. The story begins when Zane (Tony Tucci) is goofing around with a seemingly unloaded pistol and accidentally shoots the brother of Ray (Michael Parducci), knowing it was an accident the other two lads Chicken (Tom Malloy) and Mikey (Thomas Brandise) agree to take the body to Jo-Jo the junkie in order to dispose of it. Jo-Jo wants $1000 to take care of the body, the lads don’t have that kind of money but they agree to $500 if Jo-Jo can keep the corpse’s thumb for some unknown reason. The guys set out to find the $500 driving around New York looking for ways to make the money all the time with the body of Ray’s dead brother in the boot of their car. The action is comprised largely of petty arguments and bickering that erupt with the slightest prompt as the young men shove, hit, kick, insult and degrade each other, their extreme temperaments are only enhanced by the seriousness of the situation. The more they attempt to correct the situation, the worse they seem to make it. Clearly undereducated and more concerned with the code of the street than basic common sense – they are their own worst enemies.

The most obvious criticism of Gravesend is that the films content is atonal, the constant fighting and bickering between the main cast, this atonality is only enhanced by the story structure which comprises almost entirely of the young men traveling by car from one house to the next, from one shop to the next, getting into trouble and leaving for one reason or another. The film survives this criticism because of how inventive and original many of its scenes and ideas are. The film has a palpable sense of naturalism and realism, the dialogue appears largely improvised, as do a lot of the movements and action. In one scene, Zane visits his ex-girlfriend to ask for some money, after being scolded by her, he and other guys wait outside her apartment trying to work out what to do next, they then catch a glimpse of Zane’s ex meeting up with another man, Zane goes mad and chases after them, Mikey, Ray and Chicken chase him to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid and the camera chases them trying to catch-up with the action. Although this action may have been carefully blocked and planned ahead of the take, it feels more like a moment of pure spontaneity, as if the cinematographer really didn’t expect Zane to chase after the couple in such a way and followed the chase. One stand-out scene sees our central characters robbing a convenience store, mid robbery they’re interrupted by the arrival of a regular customer who comes to the store every night, Zane pretends to be a replacement clerk as so not to arouse suspicion, the customer antagonises Zane when his clear lack of experience behind the counter leads him to make several blatant errors, they get into an argument about the service which goes on for a comically protracted time before Zane runs out of patience and realises that there really is no reason to be pretending to be a store clerk in the first place and draws his gun on the unsuspecting customer. There are many such strokes of genius throughout Gravesend. Another original idea Stabile employs here is within the narration; our narrator is one of the group of friends who wasn’t there on the fateful night. We never meet our narrator face to face but he is always present and there to explain the rules and back stories of this world. Each of our four main characters get a back-story section which switches to black and white flashbacks and are completely narrated, but as the voice of the narrator is ‘one of the guys’ so to speak, it means that we’re given a unique and subjective perspective on events. His opening monologue explains how he was arrested by the police following the events of the film and questioned to see whether he was involved in any way, he concludes this section of narration by saying: “I thank God I wasn’t with my friends that night”. It is a perfect set-up for the film and by providing us with this unique narrator we’re forced to ask ourselves how things might have gone had he been present, his calm and reasonable manner suggests that he might have been able to control his friends and subdue the situation, then again he might have just as easily been caught up in the culture of violence which he so helpfully explains, that on any given evening the lads can expect to get in at least one fight but usually three fights, if you don’t get into any fights it’s because people figure you’ve got enough problems. The character of Mikey is easily the one with ‘enough problems’ upon finding his dad at home with a secret lover events take an even darker turn and later we learn that his sister had aborted Zane’s baby, this is a world where no one really has friends, they all just abuse one and other and take both life and death for granted, Mikey’s sister is the only one who recognises this fact, but her advice to ditch Zane and the others falls on deaf ears, Mikey so concerned with belonging that he’ll accept any abuse the others throw at him. Most of the films violence is off screen (gun shots are particularly noticeable, although they’re rarely used we never see them fired but instead hear the gun shot off screen) but this is one budget constraint that can be overlooked as it’s compensated for by the films numerous realistic fight scenes that involve lots of shoving, tripping, messy punches and kicks, as in real life no one looks ‘cool’ when they fight, no one gets off a clean punch, all of the principle characters just scrap about in an unorganised manner. The films editors Stabile and Miranda Devin are also very inventive, fight scenes are often edited in a non-linear fashion, cutting back and forth from the fight itself to the events that lead up to it. When Ray’s brother is shot at the start of the film, we cut between the guys discussing what to do with the body and their struggle to keep him alive, this technique is repeated as the film goes on.

In mid-1990’s American cinema there was a flurry of post-Tarantino crime movies with emphasis on odd-ball quirky coolness and so-called ‘everyday’ dialogue scenes that had no bearing on the narrative. Films like John Herzfeld’s 2 Days in the Valley (1996) which were nothing more than poor facsimiles of Tarantino’s seminal work Pulp Fiction (1994) and indeed Gravesend’s marketing did describe this as a ‘post-Tarantino’ crime film. Actually in terms of energy, pace and tone, Gravesend more closely resembles the early works of Martin Scorsese, Who’s that Knocking On My Door AKA: I Call First (1967) or Mean Streets (1973) more than any of Tarantino’s crime capers. Although Stabile doesn’t manage to elicit a performance of either Harvey Keitel or Robert De Niro’s standards from his company of first-time performers, he did manage to get the attention of a number of prominent film makers like Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone. Stone seemed particularly taken with the film, the opening caption of which reads: ‘Oliver Stone presents’ although he had no official involvement with the production he leant his name to the film to help publicise it. This is surprising as the film bears little in common with any of Stone’s work except perhaps its unorthodox editing style, clearly Stone saw potential in the young Stabile and decided to promote his debut.

The performances range considerably from uncomfortable and self-conscious (mostly the supporting actors) to unnervingly believable, Tucci in particular is brilliant in the part of Zane, he embodies all of Zane’s rampant contradictions, sometimes kind, tender and shy, other times a merciless, manipulative, oppressive, self-obsessed and violent bully. Ironically out of the main cast it is Tucci who has gone on to do the least on-screen work post Gravesend, only staring in one other short film Tim Keller’s Dreamlady (2009). As for Stabile, for a while it had appeared that he had peaked too early in his career as a director. Only in 2007 did he get to make his sophomore feature film Where God Left His Shoes, ten years after Gravesend, in the meantime he’d been working as a writer on shows like Over There, Fastlane and The Sopranos; and as a producer on shows like Rescue Me and Drive. Time will tell where his career goes from here, but I eagerly look forward to watching more of his work and hope he gets to direct a third feature film in the near future.

M.Dawson