Directed by Mad Men’s John Slattery from a novel by Pete Dexter, God’s Pocket looks like a slamdunk, can’t-miss Sundance film – a beloved actor behind the camera, adapting a work by a great American novelist, with a cast including Phillip Seymour Hoffman, John Tuturro, Richard Jenkins and Christina Hendricks. But not only does God’s Pocket miss, it misses so assuredly and so brutally that what seems like a Sundance dream film instead becomes a Sundance nightmare, ruined by condescension, bad plotting and the sort of go-nowhere subplots that fill a book with life but fill a film with dead space. At its worst, God’s Pocket mumblingly mixes the grimy chest-flexing meathead masculinity of early Mamet and a series of ostensibly comedic bits that play like Weekend at Bernie’s as written by Bukowski. At its best, it is still at its worst.
God’s Pocket opens at a funeral, as Hoffman and Hendricks are mourning their dead son Caleb Landry-Jones. After some narration from Jenkins about the title neighborhood – a run-down, blue-collar hardscrabble section of Philly – a title card then takes us three days before. This device creaks in the first place, but what Slattery and his co-collaborator on the screenplay Alex Metcalf do with it is even more broken-down, as events begin to unfold with a curiously queasy mix of homicide and ‘humor.’ Landry-Jones, we learn, was blabbing and waving a knife at a construction job, threatened an older gentleman and get hit in the back of the head with a pipe; when the cops show, everyone says it was a horrible accident. Hoffman and Hendricks are uneasy with the story they hear, and ask various agencies to investigate. Hoffman looks to the gangster he and Tuturro commit extraordinarily petty larcenies with; Hendricks looks to city-fixture and drunk newspaper columnist Richard Jenkins.
And so we get a variety of picaresque adventures in Philly’s infamous title neighborhood, with the to-and-fro of the people there depicted with the kind of condescension you normally see cruel kids inflict on ant hills. There’s no character here, just caricature, from Eddie Marsan’s venal undertaker to Peter Gerety’s booze-laden bartender. God’s Pocket also takes place in an undetermined past – there are rotary phones, typewriters in newsrooms, and you can smoke indoors – but that feels less like a setting than set dressing, and possibly a way to excuse the cops handling a murder with less curiosity and investigation than Dora the Explorer employs to inquire as to Map’s whereabouts.
I hesitate to mention this, but since you can’t spoil what’s rotten and because it perfectly sums up the movie, I’ll simply note that at one point, the coworker who, for whatever reason, actually liked Jones, goes to talk to a cop surreptitiously, he is prevented from doing so by a stutter. This is not just bad; it is Eastwood-Haggis bad, lazy and wrongheaded and obvious – and it epitomizes up all of God’s Pocket, in that the scene gets a laugh from silly, star-watching bourgeouis audience members who see no contradiction between sympathizing with Hendricks’ loss and tittering as her son’s corpse slides into the street at one point. God’s Pocket may not be the absolute worst American drama playing at Sundance – tone-deaf, vain, shapeless, indulgent and contemptuous – but I hope to God, and all of his articles of clothing, that I don’t find out what other film might be able to wrest that tarnished crown from it.