Brooklyn’sFinest rises above the usual level of parallel then converging plotlines.It stars Richard Gere, Don Cheadle and Ethan Hawke as NYPD cops on differentbeats but similarly sad trajectories. The moral of their stories is that wehave choices between right and wrong; they are seldom easy to make and ofteninvolve, as a Brooklyn criminal about to dieputs it, “the righter and the wronger.” In a moral conundrum, how many smallwrongs make a right?
The performances are all Oscar-worthy, even if theAcademy will almost certainly forget Brooklyn’sFinest by the time nominations are announced next year. Exuding weariness,Eddie Dugan (Gere) is a lonely patrolman whose soul has gone numb from killingthe pain of too many years experiencing the worst of human behavior. He ismarking the days until retirement. Sad-eyed Tango Butler (Cheadle) is workingdeep undercover among the city’s drug pushers; he is angry and distrustful ofhis white handlers, who promise him a promotion, and maintains an ice-coldindifference in the face of gang brutality. Wiry, jittery Sal Procida (Hawke)is with the NYPD’s shock troops in heavily armed assaults on drug houses. He isdeeply upset at his chump-change salary and his circumstances. His wife suffersasthma from the moldy, rotting house where they live. They already havechildren and twins are on the way.
None of those men know each other, though they willintersect in the end. Dugan has an opportunity to pull himself from hislethargy to help another human being, even if he must break the law to do so.Tango is offered a full detective’s badge if he betrays his best friend, thesoul-on-ice gangster Caz (Wesley Snipes). Worried about his wife and kids,Procida has begun murdering drug dealers and stealing their money to buy hisfamily the house he could never afford.
Brooklyn’sFinest is not an advertisement for the tourist-friendly, post-Giuliani New York where smokingcigarettes and honking car horns are punishable with fines. It harkens back tothose great films of the ’70s, Serpicoor The FrenchConnection, when the city was a decomposing beast of crime, povertyand corruption. Some of the mean streets look no different now than they did 40years ago. Director Antoine Fuqua (TrainingDay) uses the harsh sounds, hard edges and deep abysses of the city as acharacter, not a backdrop. He maintains a taut rhythm and builds a gatheringaura of suspense around the fate of the three protagonists.
The bravura cinematic moment comes early, whenProcida tries to confess his sins in a Roman Catholic church. A feeble lightshines through the metal grillwork of the confessional, illuminating the crossdesign in the grating separating penitent from priest and leaving thebackground in deep darkness. Procida is wracked with inner turmoil and guilt,knowing that murder is wrong, yet killing out of love for his family. As hetries to tell the priest, he’s not looking for God’s forgiveness. He wantsGod’s help in getting away with murder.