Best known for the political thriller The Contender (2000), which received Oscar nominations for Joan Allen and Jeff Bridges, filmmaker Rod Lurie had not one, but two good movies ready to go in December. But when their distributor, Yari Film Group, went bankrupt just as they were set to launch, Nothing But the Truth, which he wrote and directed, and What Doesn’t Kill You, which he produced, vanished. Outside of press screenings, festival exposure, and abortive weeklong Academy Award-qualifying releases in New York and Los Angeles, their reappearance on DVD this week qualifies as a premiere.
What doesn’t kill Rod Lurie, though, makes him stronger—or, at least, receptive to a Popdose interview. I met Lurie in an unusual way: On my blog, I called his 2007 movie Resurrecting the Champ the work of a “middlebrow hack.” A few months later, I nearly fell off my chair when he sent me a note praising me for my review. (If only all this critic’s critics did the same thing.) Intrigued, I began a correspondence, and—full disclosure—have him as a Facebook friend. (He updates frequently for a boldface name, often about sports.)
This backstory, however, didn’t affect my judgment of the two films. I caught Nothing But the Truth, which was inspired by the Valerie Plame affair, at a screening, and was impressed, not least with the strong central performances by Kate Beckinsale and Vera Farmiga. What Doesn’t Kill You is equally hard-hitting and affecting. Director, co-star and co-writer Brian Goodman based the film on his misspent youth in South Boston, and it digs more realistically into its criminal subculture than either Mystic River or The Departed. It’s the story of two friends, Brian (Mark Ruffalo) and Paulie (Ethan Hawke), who after a lifetime of petty crimes dream of bigger scores. Paulie wants to rob an armored car, a caper that only the truly foolhardy attempt; Brian, meanwhile, would like to be more of a husband and father, but the easy money and his hard-to-break cocaine habit trip him up.
Lurie is a former film journalist who still practices his craft, and he comes out swinging. For The Huffington Post, he attacked The Reader for its gross historical distortions as Oscar season was in full swing; for The Wrap, he went after slipshod independent reporter-bloggers like Hollywood columnist Nikki Finke, who had gotten the facts wrong when he switched representation. It’s interesting interviewing a fellow journalist; he started by asking whether this was going to be in Q&A or prose format (so as to gauge how careful he should be with his answers), asked me questions (which is always slightly unnerving when you’re marching through your own agenda), requested that for your benefit as potential viewers we go off the record when discussing the ending of Nothing But the Truth, and came up with his own -30- to our session, which I retained. He is foremost a storyteller, and he had some stories to tell, about the fate of the two films, his upcoming remake of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (sacrilege!), middlebrow hackdom, and winning the presidential seal of approval. (more…)
