The important importance in Nick Gomez’s astounding, explosive initiation, “Laws of Acuteness,” comes when Denise (Edie Falco), a tough Brooklyn female who lives with the leader of a commonplace-delay pack of street criminals, asks Frankie (Paul Schulze), an old friend just finished of jail, to explain why he is so messed up. Sucking emphatically on a cigarette, she says, “You’re one of those people, right, that things just sorta happen to you, right? It’s not like things are your fault or anything, set to rights?”
To which Frankie responds: “I’m just trying to live my life, you know. Sometimes I do things, and I get in trouble for it. I’m just trying to do what I like to do, you know. Trying to live. You should try it sometime.”
Director Gomez, 29, who made the picture on a minuscule budget of $38,000, is the newest (and maybe the most gifted) member of a young generation of filmmakers — Spike Lee and Oliver Stone among them — who watched Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” and came away dying to make movies.
He’s gone back to what, in essence, was best (and what is now frequently missing) in Scorsese’s work — its tension and moral rawness, its rock-and-roll energy and directness — and made its spirit fit his own needs and circumstances.
Stuff happens in “Laws of Gravity,” cruel, violent, devastating stuff that seems almost always to emerge from the blandest of circumstances. An afternoon picnic suddenly turns ugly when Jon (Adam Trese) smacks his girlfriend, Celia (Arabella Field); a casual sidewalk encounter with a couple of strangers ends with Jonny flashing a gun, throwing enough heat his way for him to be arrested for missing his court date on a shoplifting charge. Because Jimmy (Peter Greene) is the leader of the pack and is obliged to come to his friend’s rescue, he steals a stash of hot guns to make Jon’s bail. The guy whose guns Jimmy “borrowed” doesn’t like it, and that’s how some little nothing, like Jon’s shoplifting, can mushroom into something big, like a man’s body, cold, on the sidewalk.
This is the genius of Gomez’s film; it shows how big crimes, and the big mistakes in life, are merely a series of many smaller crimes and misjudgments.
“Why didn’t you go to court today, Jonny?” someone asks. “I did not wanna go, and that is the reason” is his flip response. The characters appear always to have within them the ability, or at least the opportunity, to turn away from disaster but never do. In episode after episode, they act in their own worst interest, even when it would seem far easier to go the other way.
Someone once said that John Huston’s films were about losers losing, and that description fits perfectly here. Jimmy, who comes closest to being a straight-up guy, might save himself if he abandons Jon, an immature hothead who’s like the magnetic north for trouble and probably greatly deserves every bad thing that’s ever happened to him. But if Jimmy did that he couldn’t live with himself. That’s not the way he’s put together, and Greene shows why everyone in the neighborhood defers to him, and how, in an unstable world, even a man with shallow roots can be a king.
These characters are part of a family, with a rigid pecking order, rituals and codes of conduct, which in turn fills its hierarchical space in relation to the other neighborhood families. Jimmy’s crew is made up of Frankie and Jon and an assortment of local aging toughs, who hang out at a local bar looking for action.
They’re children, all of them, kicking the dirt under the monkey bars. But the movie is not only about how the men refuse to grow up, but also about how the women, who are smarter and more grounded in reality, hold their world together. The movie has a drunken relentlessness; it keeps barreling forward, building one climax on top of another, until the action erupts and resolves itself in one horrific, irrevocable flash of insanity.
But “Laws of Gravity” is often as funny as it is volatile. The bantering dialogue crackles with vibrant street talk. What is that sound, you ask? The sound of Y chromosomes in collision. It’s only after the movie’s tension is released, after the lights come up, that you realize how powerful its grip on you had been. Gomez has built this script out of cast-iron and brick; every single element is played out to its fullest. And by some of the most talented young actors to work together since Barry Levinson’s “Diner.”
As Denise, Falco is a mind-blower; she displays precisely the kind of fist-like talent that Ellen Barkin showed early in her career. She’s almost maternally fierce in her acting, as if this character were her baby and pity anyone who stifles it or intends it harm. She’s a major find.
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So is Trese, who brings out Jonny’s rosy choirboyishness as well as his thorns. And so are Greene and Field. And Schulze. And everybody else in the cast. Simply put, “Laws of Gravity” is one of the most exciting movies of the year.
“Laws of Gravity” is rated R, for strong language.