Movie Review : The Drop (2014)

This review is best enjoyed it you read this first. 

Every reader (and most non-readers) will tell you: there are many more great books than there are great movies. There are several reasons for that. Literature has a serious head start of about 500 years on cinema, for starters. The main reason is that movies are produced to make money, and that novels are (at first) written to tell a story. The gap in expectations often end up creating a gap in quality. In 2014, alpha dog storyteller Dennis Lehane got a screenplay of his produced into a feature film and released the novel version simultaneously. If anyone could pull this off, Lehane could. Since I showered the novel with praise last week, I thought it'd be only fair to give the movie (arguably the original output) a shot.

The story is essentially the same, down to a couple inane, nit-picky detail that vary only slightly. Bob Saginowski (Tom Hardy)'s a lonely bartender, looking for something to hold on to, in his life. One night, he finds puppy bleeding from its forehead in a trashcan, meets a girl (Noomi Rapace) and gets what he wishes for. The quiet life of working at his cousin Marv (James Gandolfini) is over as he knows it. They get held up one night, Bob starts getting drop-in visits from a strange, dangerous-looking man (Matthias Schoenaerts) claiming the dog he found is his. Life is going to change for ol' Bob Saginowski and it'll be up to him to dictate if it's going to change for better or worse.

So yeah, I've read the novel before watching the movie. It means that everything in this review will be influenced by this choice I've made. THE DROP was basically the vision of one man, so it doesn't exactly plays by the rules of Hollywood. Michaël R. Roskam does an honest job at directing this movie, but his main contribution is not drawing outside the lines. He observes the tone of Dennis Lehane's urban novels and follows the script wherever it takes him. The only aspect of his job that isn't utterly minimalist is the photography, for which I believe natural lighting was used so in a sense it's minimalistic too, it just has a stronger identity.

If you think about it, Tom Hardy and puppies are kind of a seller.

Of course, Tom Hardy is magnificent as Bob Saginowski. I believe the stills of Hardy playing Bob came out before the novel was even hinted at, so he's always been the very embodiment of the character. I don't know about you, but I've pictured Hardy as Bob from the get-go when I read the novel and his actual interpretation is ridiculously seamless. The nice surprises are the European cast, Noomi Rapace and Matthias Schoenaerts, who picked up the Brooklyn accent (I guess this is the main difference with the novel, which is located in a Boston suburb) like it was nothing. Schoenaerts in particular displayed his impressive range by playing a convincing psychopath after nailing the tormented, barely functional heartthrob in the French adaptation of Craig Davidson's RUST AND BONE. 

The $100,000 question here is: is it worth reading the novel and watching the movie both? It is, but maybe not back to back, like I did. Dennis Lehane's writing is so pure and transcendent, it's difficult to compare an actual movie production to the experience of reading one of his novels. THE DROP is a tremendous movie in itself, but if you've read the novel beforehand, watch it when you feel like re-reading the book (i.e. a couple of weeks/months later, when the details will have faded). A Dennis Lehane movie with a star-studded cast is a wonderful idea, but it still can't quite measure up to his novels. The man is that good with words. THE DROP is best enjoyed on its own, or at least slightly removed from any Dennis Lehane reading experiences.