#301: Cop Land

Release Date: August 15th, 1997

Format: Streaming (Tubi)

Written by: James Mangold

Directed by: James Mangold

3 Stars

After his buzzy debut at Sundance in 1995 with the independent film Heavy, writer/director James Mangold (still in his early thirties) was trusted by Miramax with $15 million to see what he could do for his next feature. I’m sure the Weinsteins hoped they had another Tarantino on their hands, a bold, young filmmaker who could be both a box office draw and a critical darling.

Mangold would eventually go on to plenty of Hollywood success over the next three decades (Walk the Line, Logan, Ford v Ferrari), but Cop Land shows that in 1997, he was still a developing filmmaker..

He can’t quite nail down a genre or a tone with Cop Land. Howard Shore provides the prominent orchestral score, full of booming French horns and timpanis, that lend the picture a prestige drama feel, but Mangold also dips into gritty crime genre tropes, quiet character study beats, and in the end, a full-blown urban western - with a small town New Jersey Sheriff forced to singlehandedly face off against a posse of corrupt cops.

Mangold’s script is simply over ambitious for a film that’s well under two hours long. To borrow a line from Miloš Forman’s Amadeus, “My dear young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all.”

The performances of this A+ cast are dialed too high as well, but boy are they fun performances. You’ve got Robert De Niro chopping on sandwiches and screaming at colleagues in his crummy little office at NYPD’s Internal Affairs Dept., Robert Patrick calling female cops “Honey” and walking around in a track suit and a blonde mustache, Ray Liotta sniffing coke and ranting about traffic signals, a platinum blonde Cathy Moriarty puffing cigarettes like a femme fatale, and Harvey Keitel crunching on bar pretzels and contemplating who he might need to kill next. They are all huge performances that would work in a certain type of movie, but I’m afraid Mangold just isn’t sure which type of movie that is.

And then there is Sylvester Stallone. He plays Sheriff Freddy Heflin, a shuffling simpleton of a man, deaf in one ear, hopelessly in love with a woman who is married with children. Stallone is the heart of the movie, and he’s brilliant. It really is a shame that a decade of action hero superstardom robbed us of more dramatic Stallone roles. He has such a knack for portraying protagonists that are vulnerable, observant, and dismissed. People misremember that first Rocky movie as a sports-action flick, but it’s not; it’s a dramatic character study of a man who learns to overcome his fears because he’s in love. Kudos to Mangold in recognizing Stallone for the part, when by 1997, Stallone’s career was well on its way to bottoming out. 

So watch Cop Land for Stallone, some supporting performances that are bananas, and to see a young auteur almost make a great movie.