Sean Penn, Tye Sheridan
“ASPHALT CITY” My rating: B (In theaters)
120 minutes | MPAA rating: R
It’s been so well done that you’re compelled to keep watching, but along the way “Asphalt City” will have you wondering just how much ugliness and trauma an audience is expected to take.
Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s third feature is a grim, gritty and existentially challenging study of a young man going slowly bonkers. But that isn’t immediately clear.
For the first 45 minutes the film employs a semi-documentary style (handheld camera, a cacophony of screams, the almost constant shriek of ambulance sirens) to sink us neck-deep in the daily grind of Ollie Cross (Tye Sheridan), a new EMT for the NYC Fire Department.
Along with Cross’s partner, the much more experienced and disturbingly cynical Rutkovsky (Sean Penn), we are almost immediately thrown into the chaos of a shooting in a housing project. It’s a scattered, splattered dreamlike (or, more accurealy, nightmarish) collage of pulsing gore, angry voices and intimidating gestures.
Basically the first half of the movie is a rapid-fire montage of what Cross and Rutkovsky endure daily: Heart attacks, overdoses, the ugly fallout of physical mayhem. A bedsore-riddled patient in a cheap nursing home. A body discovered after weeks in fly-infested apartment.
Many of the people they serve speak no English and are antagonistic whenever anyone in a uniform shows up. Like the middle-aged female junkie brought back from the edge who cusses out her saviors for not letting her out of the ambulance to score.
“We cant save everyone, not even with all the toys and the training,” Rutkovsky tells the newbie.
The screenplay (by Ben Mac Brown, Shannon Burke and Ryan King) doesn’t provide Cross with much respite in his off-duty hours. He sublets a beyond-shabby room in a China Town tenement; he’s hoping to save enough money for medical school…if he can pass the entrance exams.
About the only calming element in his world is a young single mother (Raquel Nave) he meets at a dance club; the mostly wordless scenes between the two are frankly intimate, but the effect is less eroticism than lyrical escapism. For a minute, anyway, Cross can forget the horrors of his workday.
After 45 minutes “Asphalt City” tones down the frantic editing and bobbling camerawork and settles down enough to dig a bit into its characters.
Rutkovsiy introduces the kid to a woman (Kathleen Waterston) who wryly identifies herself as “the most recent ex-wife and mother of his only child.” Indeed, in the presence of his young daughter the grizzled Rutkovsky is all gentleness and loving language.
A couple of segments stand out for their fierceness. In one Rutkovsky loses it and attacks a surly wife beater; in another the pair frantically work on a young woman (“True Detective’s” Kali Reis) found in a blood-soaked bed. She has given birth to what appears to be a dead baby. Plus she used heroin to try to dull the pain of labor.
Slowly it dawns on us that Cross is losing it. Initially he sees himself as a good guy (out of uniform he sports a flashy red jacket with angel wings embroidered on the shoulders), but no one could remain unaffected by the daily diet of anger and anger’s bloody fallout.
“We carry the misery and nobody gives two shits about it,” observes one of the EMTs.
Indeed, among the paramedics the most effective retirement plan seems to be suicide.
“Asphalt City” ends on a more-or-less upbeat note, but not before pushing its young protagonist into primal scream territory.
Along the way it delivers a few notable surprises.
Mike Tyson (yes, that Mike Tyson) is absolutely believable as a tough/weary NYFD chief in charge of the EMTs.
Michael Pitt (where’s he been for the last decade?) is astonishingly good as a soul-dead paramedic perfectly happy to deny treatment to a wounded drug dealer — if the creep dies in the back of an ambulance it would be a public service.
And there’s a small army of performers (I’m guessing relatively few of them are professional actors) who are devastatingly effective as the New Yorkers our heroes encounter on their runs.
In its last 20 minutes “Asphalt City” flirts with pretentiousness. But by then it’s earned our trust.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 