God's Pocket - gritty, working class

Watched this excellent drama last Tuesday evening.  Set in the 1970's working class community of God's Pocket (which seems to be somewhere on the Eastern seaboard of the USA, at some point in the 1970s), it tells the story of a community reacting to the death of the young mouthy upstart Leon (Caleb Landry Jones).  Leon crosses one too many lines and is killed when a co-worker hits him over the head with an iron bar in an act that could be argued is self defence.  The workers at the site though tell their own story to the police, and Leon's death is officially recorded as an accident.  Cue various parties, including Leon's mother (Christina Hendricks) refusing to believe the official story, and searching for a different answer.

God's Pocket is a film that tries very hard to paint a picture of a community, and then allows a story to be told naturally through the interactions of the characters.  This is as opposed to a more typical structure that might focus on the story and introduce characters as and when they fit into the narrative.  The central story of potential murder is one that almost gets lost as the tapestry of God's Pocket is slowly revealed.  This is a community where being born there makes you an insider, and no matter how long you might be a part of it, an outsider is still ultimately an outsider.  Philip Seymour Hoffman (in one of his last ever roles) plays such a character; a man who is respected by the community, but can never be one of them.  His role is of a man who wants to do the right thing but just isn't very good at it, who's heart is huge and in the right place, but who seems unable to escape the baggage of a past the film only hints at.

The film is very clear on portraying the way that the community depicted in the film treats those it sees as being part of it, and those who are outsiders.  There is a moral code of understanding and justice that the community acts upon without outside intervention, which usually ends up doing the right thing if for the wrong reasons or via dubious methods.

I could see some criticising the film for its sprawling narrative.  The story is quite unfocussed and it tries to get through quite a lot of scene-setting characters in a short 90 minutes of running time.  However I see it as being like a striped-down version of Fargo without the comedy, in which the real story is one of a community and how it reacts to its own criminal elements.  The community knows that Leon is a bad egg, probably even his mother knows it too.  So when he ends up dead the presumption is that he had it coming, so why ask questions?  It's a stark demonstration of the principle of natural justice, and how even in communities that appear to exist outside the conventional law, a natural unspoken law exists none-the-less.  Certainly worth checking out.