Plowing Through Familiar Territory

I recently saw two movies back to back at home that plowed through very familiar territory. They were, “Pride and Glory,” a melodrama about good and bad cops, all of them members of one Irish family, and an Ivory/Merchant drama called “Before the Rains,” a tale of illicit love between a British landowner and a Indian woman employee during the waning days of colonialism in Southern India.
“Pride and Glory” concerns a family of cops, the Tireneys, the father, who is a Police Department Chieftain (Jon Voight), who is a bit too fond of alcohol and is more interested in cops sticking together than weeded out the bad apples; an older son, Frannie (Noah Emmerich), who’s a police commander in a tough section of Washington Heights in New York City, who is solid but willing to look the other way on occasion; a younger brother, Ray (Edward Norton), a hot-shot ex-detective who has withdrawn and is a loner who lives on a rundown boat; and Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell), who is married to Ray and Frannie’s sister, Megan (Lake Bell), a hot-headed corrupt cop, the bad cop in the scenario, who is loving around the family but away from it brutal, nasty, and willing to not only kill street criminals, but capable of framing other family members to save his own skin. The father talks Ray into reengaging as a Detective on a case where 4 officers were slaughtered by some Hispanic thugs who were warned the cops were coming, and Ray finds out that it was a dirty cop who called them to warn them heat was coming. When told about the situation, neither Frannie nor the father wanted to believe it. The rest of the story was about the tug of war between family members, and who was going to do the right thing. And I’ll bet you can guess how it turns out.
The best part of the film is the nitty-gritty action and raw violence, which has an in-your-face kind of reality. And it is photographed up close and sordid. The acting is competent and suitable for such a high wire act, with Noah Emmerich and his wife, Abby (Jennifer Ehle), more outstanding than the rest. Colin Farrell has a tendency to be way over the top. He flames out on occasion. He can be a scorched earth kind of actor if a Director doesn’t rein him in.
“Before the Rains” is a story of a British planter in Southern India who is having an affair with his Indian house keeper while his wife was away in England. The time is 1937 when Indians all over the country were reacting to colonialism and wanting to push the British out to become independent. The planter, Moores, is played by Linus Roache, who is currently a lawyer on television’s “Law and Order” program. An attractive Indian actress, Nandita Das, is Sanjani, the housekeeper, who finds herself in an impossible situation when her husband and the village people find out she was sleeping with the planter. At the same time Moores gives her a little cash and boots her out, telling his foreman on the farm, T.K. (Rahul Bose), to take her far away so no one thinks too badly of him. So the poor woman, who has already been beaten by her irate Indian husband and taken advantage of by her foreign employer, is now rejected by Moores and shipped out of sight to assuage his guilt and and protect his investment on the farm and in a road he is building. She’s trapped between a rock and a hard place.
From the moment you got the drift of the narrative you knew it was heading toward disaster. Moores wife is played by Jennifer Ehle who has less to do in this film than “Pride and Glory’ but does her bit well enough. She leaves Moores when she finds out what a double-dealing coward he is. In similar fashion, T.K. has to solve the dilemma he’s in: Does he remain loyal to his employer or does he obey the moral and cultural guidelines of his people? In the meanwhile the rage for independence is being shouted in the streets of the village. The film, even if quite predictable, is a good lesson about a cultural clash. It is also beautifully photographed in a jungle area in Southern India. It was written and directed by an Indian.