Finestkind
PARAMOUNTFinestkind is akin to those early dramatic silent and talkie pieces of cinema that detailed small or local townspeople working in log yards or as lumberjacks in which corporate or debilitating entities come to disrupt and shake the local industry. Brian Helgeland's latest directorial effort, Finestkind, is akin to that very sentiment and takes a look at a local fishing crew in the wake of failing business and cash flow which face difficult circumstances and fallout. That being said, Helgeland's feature is an incredibly basic melodrama which fails to evoke a sense of impact and flails with emotive dynamics and a central plot that takes a staggering hour in its running time to suddenly change tones to a radical and inconsequential degree of fallout.
Finestkind is a feature that has the clear sentiments of wanting to echo the nature of an American classic. It touches on an array of political and societal undertones about blue-collar subject matter but slowly descends into a B-picture masquerade of melodramatic conviction that undeniably affects and misguides the bigger picture and overall themes it intends to discuss. This is also a film of two halves. The first – arguably the better produced but the slower and monotonous of the two – focuses solely on crafting characters and drives to build the world with emotive immersion and therefore engagement for the resulting second part of fallout. Themes of political undertones and societal frustrations of debt, blue-collar stagnation in terms of class structure, and idealistic notions of pushing away the elite. The conviction is muted and, while engaging, never pushes itself past the notion of being one-note, saying very little that is either new or profound or even remotely poignant. The frustrations are felt in terms of performance with Ben Foster, Toby Wallace and Tommy Lee Jones taking considerable thematic tone with the aforementioned themes and doing quite a strong assignment of evoking a sense of strangulation in each respective element. By far, Jones has the strongest and most poignant arc but the irony is that he has the least running time and spotlight upon said story. An impact that severely dampens underwhelms and undermines the arc between his character and his on-screen play by Ben Foster. It is icey and dicey but hauntingly underbaked in both length and consistency to ring home in the climax of the feature and give depth to the unspoken and unseen. What is presented in this very dynamic is, in fact, what the feature ultimately projects: an incredibly underwhelming and underwritten venture. The sins of the father and the dynamic with the son are on a whole a clear venture to examine here but in both cases of Foster and Jones, or Wallace and Tim Daly which is even more plagued by genre convention, are ever so customary and basic in creation, execution and dynamic.
Here which enters the second part of the story, Finestkind after its hour mark of trying to inject emotive discourse within its characters then turns both tone and theme and goes into a radically different route of drug running. If it comes out of the blue in this review then rest assured it comes across as even more erratic on film. Writer and director Helgeland drops quite small albeit heavy, on-the-nose pieces to suggest the local town and societal underbelly is struggling with addiction and placing Jenna Ortega – who is horrific here, but more on that later – as one type of character, along with Aaron Stanford, to rumble a secondary story arc that convenes to throw this story into a different direction. The execution, like part one, is underwhelming and severely underwritten, taking once again the most conventional and arbitrary degree of direction on the page and the screen imaginable. It elicits little tension or atmosphere with direction or tone, made far stranger in which Ortega's character dealing with drugs as a necessity to survive without and oneness of tonal discourse to suggest anything wrong with cutting and selling a commodity that utterly destroys lives, and in turn sets the motion of this second half fallout inadvertently, but again, what would suggest otherwise in what has been mentioned above? So in this conventional story arc, push comes to shove, and Helgeland takes the obvious step to wrap up this story in a poor attempt at the father accepting the sins of the son and accountability, but it lacks substance and pauses with such haste to touch on themes and the central dynamic in which is meant to be presented. And then genuinely all is solved with little fallout and all is saved. It just comes across as both patronising and severely underbaked on all fronts.
This second part just shows the lack of sight that director Helgeland crafts with this story. The sheer lack of substance and obvious depiction of convention is an element that is often shoddy. The character played by Aaron Stanford, who causes mayhem, is never explored otherwise from the obvious and one-note depiction of the simple drug addict. The new father Ismael Cruz Córdova is never explored in his dynamic of choosing a path that brings his wife and newborn child into disrepute and is just forgotten about as quickly as it is implemented. Then there is Jenna Ortega, who is partly saved from her embarrassment due to the screenplay, which again provides simplistic convention and some of the flattest and uninspiring dialogue imaginable that offers so little flavour and immersion in her story arc and relationship with Wallace's character. That being said, Ortega is nothing short of horrible here. She is unironically Audrey Plaza's level of awkwardness and miscast in performance, showcasing little depth, emotive talent or even charm and charisma. Her delivery of the playful tongue-in-cheek "white boy" and sense of flirtatious invitation from the get-go is nothing short of cringe-worthy, and for it to be revealed she peddles drugs and stands tall on her two feet is almost laughable throughout and exhibits little conviction, believability and therefore immersion.
The emphasis of Finestkind is clear and admirable but the conviction is a flat, unsubtle and often tonally contrasting in delivery and direction of a feature that has no idea what it wants to be. It is a venture that holds a purported vast amount of weight within American society and does little to nothing with it in screenplay and narrative. It fails to evoke a sense of opinion and suggestion and equally fails to give its performers any amount of impact or detail to latch upon. Thrown upon that is the lifeless and flat central dynamic between Ortega and Toby Wallace that entails little chemistry and conviction, it begs the question of what works here and to cut deep, what is the point?
