I’ve always been fascinated by movies set somewhere in the backwaters of America. Outside the big cities on the east and west coasts, in parts of the US where life is completely different from the urban, bustling, modern way we usually see in most movies and series. In parts of America where it seems that people’s lives are somehow predestined and these people somehow stoically endure all hardships, painstaking and hard work, and they must be aware that it will be very difficult for them to pay off. These are the people that Bruce Springsteen sang about on his early albums, and the setting in the great drama that will eventually turn into Scott Cooper’s revenge thriller is reminiscent of the one we met in the great “Deer Hunter” by Michael Cimino.
The action of “Out of the Furnace” takes place somewhere in the interior of Pennsylvania, in the extreme east of the American Rust Belt or “Rust Belt”, a zone of heavy industry that began to suffer even more after industrial production began to move somewhere in the late seventies, early eighties to where is cheaper labor. Russell Baze (standard convincing Christian Bale) is a worker in the steel plant where his father also worked and he is a man who tries to live an average life and does not complain much about what fate has in store for him. He seems like a happy man and is in a relationship with Lena (Zoe Saldana), but everything will fall apart when one night under the influence of alcohol, he causes a traffic accident in which the driver of the car he crashed into with his jeep will die.
And he will look at going to prison as something he deserved, as something he has to do, believing that everything will remain the same when he gets out in a year or two. But when he gets out, everything will change. His father died, Lena left him and now he’s in a relationship with police officer Wesley (Forest Whitaker), and his troubled younger brother Rodney (Casey Affleck), who served four tours in Iraq which left a deep mark on his psyche, is stuck is in serious debt to local bar owner and do-gooder John Petty (Willem Dafoe). Petty is indebted to a much more serious and dangerous guy, a hillbilly from rural New Jersey Harlan DeGroat (Woody Harrelson), a sociopathic dealer and a complete maniac who organizes illegal boxing matches in the hills of Appalachia.
When he runs out of everything, Russell will decide to take fate into his own hands, and “Out of the Furnace” was a realistic, authentic and believable combination of thriller and drama with an impressive cast including Sam Shepard as Russ and Rodney’s uncle. This is a film in which only the environment plays an important role, that cruel, cold industrial area, and often in wide shots we see those steel mills, foundries and other facilities for heavy metallurgy or whatever is produced there that requires hard and often extremely unhealthy physical work. However, these factories are often the only choice for the people who live there, and for those who do not want to accept such a fate, the only alternative to moving is crime. Although “Out of the Furnace” did not do well at the box office, and the American critics were not particularly impressed, for me it is an exceptional, almost perfect film.