Review: ‘Out Of The Furnace’

“Out of the Furnace” is a good movie, though it does fall short of greatness because of over familiarity. With elements of revenge films, movies about depressed blue collar towns in America, and stories about struggling families, there is little that feels new or fresh or original with “Out of the Furnace“. But there’s nothing new about chicken parmigiana yet if it is made well, it can’t be beat, right? So “Out of the Furnace” is like a meal you’ve had plenty of times before, and while it may not excite you, you still appreciate that it’s well made and with the highest quality of ingredients.

This is a story about a couple of brothers, Russell Baze (Christian Bale) and his younger bro Rodney (Casey Affleck). They live in Braddock, PA, which is a dying little town on its last legs, as rumors of the mill being shut down looms over everyone like the Sword of Damocles, and tragedy hits the Baze family pretty hard early on, and then gets compounded thanks to some unfortunate circumstances mixed with bad decisions. Soon enough, Russell has to deal with his girlfriend leaving him (Zoe Saldana) and his brother getting mixed up in a bad way with a local bookie (Willem Dafoe) and a violent criminal New Jersey hillbilly (Woody Harrelson). Round out the cast with always reliable actors Sam Shepard and Forest Whitaker and you got a movie that hums with life and meaning, even if its not saying anything original or deeply profound.

Because there is some stuff in here about the depressed American economy, thanks to both the setting and the very specific 2008 pre-presidential election setting, but nothing is really SAID about this state of the economy, it is just the setting for the story. Likewise, Rodney is a soldier with four tours of duty in Iraq under his belt, and he’s got both PTSD from the tours and he’s struggling to find work back in the States, but again, there is not much to distinguish this war veteran from other war veterans from other movies featuring characters like this.

And really this is a story that is mostly about Russell Baze and his own existential crisis, as he is struggling to just scrape by and the saddest thing is how happy it would make him to have his brother just give in to the drudgery of life and get himself a job at the town mill so he can just scrape by, too, and it is heartbreaking when his brother tells him no and that he would rather be dead instead of working by his side. It is a sad situation, and one that only gets worse and worse thanks to some ill advised decisions. And each decision and each piece of bad news and each obstacle can be read on Christian Bale’s face as he goes through this movie, and it’s hard not to like this guy and want to see things work out better for him, and it is frustrating when so much goes so bad because he means well, he just wants to live a normal life, without having to struggle just to get by, and he’s making the best of what he has, but man is it brutal for him.

This is a very solid movie, it just isn’t groundbreaking or anything like that, but that’s not a bad thing. The acting all around is so well done that everything just feels real and lived in, there may be nothing new in here but there are universal truths. People really do suffer in this country, and sometimes the criminal, illegal option seems so tempting, and there are so many people struggling just to keep their families together and to make a better future for themselves and this is all reflected in “Out of the Furnace,” universal truths to which so many people can relate, which gives the movie at least some gravity and weight, which we can see laid on the shoulders of Russell Baze, the heaviness of the world bringing him down, to which he has to struggle against, and which we get to watch. Not necessarily a fun thing to do, but definitely worth watching thanks to the immense level of talent and skill involved therein.