Brooklyn’s Finest rises above the usual level of parallel then converging plotlines. It stars Richard Gere, Don Cheadle and Ethan Hawke as NYPD cops on different beats but similarly sad trajectories. The moral of their stories is that we have choices between right and wrong; they are seldom easy to make and often involve, as a Brooklyn criminal about to die puts it, “the righter and the wronger.” In a moral conundrum, how many small wrongs make a right?
The performances are all Oscar-worthy, even if the Academy will almost certainly forget Brooklyn’s Finest by the time nominations are announced next year. Exuding weariness, Eddie Dugan (Gere) is a lonely patrolman whose soul has gone numb from killing the pain of too many years experiencing the worst of human behavior. He is marking the days until retirement. Sad-eyed Tango Butler (Cheadle) is working deep undercover among the city’s drug pushers; he is angry and distrustful of his white handlers, who promise him a promotion, and maintains an ice-cold indifference in the face of gang brutality. Wiry, jittery Sal Procida (Hawke) is with the NYPD’s shock troops in heavily armed assaults on drug houses. He is deeply upset at his chump-change salary and his circumstances. His wife suffers asthma from the moldy, rotting house where they live. They already have children and twins are on the way.
None of those men know each other, though they will intersect in the end. Dugan has an opportunity to pull himself from his lethargy to help another human being, even if he must break the law to do so. Tango is offered a full detective’s badge if he betrays his best friend, the soul-on-ice gangster Caz (Wesley Snipes). Worried about his wife and kids, Procida has begun murdering drug dealers and stealing their money to buy his family the house he could never afford.
Brooklyn’s Finest is not an advertisement for the tourist-friendly, post-Giuliani New York where smoking cigarettes and honking car horns are punishable with fines. It harkens back to those great films of the ’70s, Serpico or The FrenchConnection, when the city was a decomposing beast of crime, poverty and corruption. Some of the mean streets look no different now than they did 40 years ago. Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) uses the harsh sounds, hard edges and deep abysses of the city as a character, not a backdrop. He maintains a taut rhythm and builds a gathering aura of suspense around the fate of the three protagonists.
The bravura cinematic moment comes early, when Procida tries to confess his sins in a Roman Catholic church. A feeble light shines through the metal grillwork of the confessional, illuminating the cross design in the grating separating penitent from priest and leaving the background in deep darkness. Procida is wracked with inner turmoil and guilt, knowing that murder is wrong, yet killing out of love for his family. As he tries to tell the priest, he’s not looking for God’s forgiveness. He wants God’s help in getting away with murder.
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