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With the arrival of The Pale Blue Sky, director Scott Cooper has delivered an impressive a career that’s managed to span a surprising amount of genres. The director has managed to explore revenge thrillers, horror movies, Westerns, crime dramas, and more. Cooper would be the first to admit that he isn’t as much of a household name filmmaker as Jordan Peele or Christopher Nolan. However, his willingness to embrace new creative territory whenever he steps up to the plate as a director suggests he should be more well-known, or at least more appreciated for his eclectic nature.
That level of variety makes ranking his directorial efforts from worst to best an especially interesting exercise. Throughout a little over a decade of directorial work, Cooper hasn’t always helmed perfect movies, but even his weaker titles offer something interesting in their ambition. Meanwhile, his greatest accomplishments (including one movie that scored Jeff Bridges his lone Oscar win) reaffirm why he should be on the tip of the tongue of more movie buffs. Let’s look at these highs and lows in ranking this man’s work, starting with one of his most recent and unusual directorial efforts.
6. Antlers
For his fifth directorial effort, Antlers, Cooper shifted away from dramas and over to horror filmmaking to tell the tale of a young boy tormented by his father who is shapeshifting into a Wendigo. Starring Keri Russell and Jesse Plemons, this Oregon-set campfire tale is certainly pretty to look at, particularly whenever it juxtaposes the bright reds and oranges of Autumn with monstrous carnage. Unfortunately, the screenplay for Antlers struggles mightily to realize its ambitions of being a creature feature that’s also about the long-term effects of living with an abusive parent.
This weighty theme is undercut by several critical aspects of the script, including ham-fisted dialogue and a third act that frequently foregoes allegorical elements in favor of generic monster mayhem. Also proving disappointing is how Oscar-nominee Graham Greene is only around for a disposable supporting role so that he can provide exposition on indigenous culture to white people. Worst of all, the scares aren’t anything special, with only the mutilated bodies torn apart by the hungry Wendigo proving unnerving. It’s admirable that Cooper shifted into a different filmmaking mode for Antlers, but that quality isn’t enough to carry this messy movie. This one’s a must-see for Jesse Plemons completists only.
5. Hostiles
Just before his retirement, Captain Joseph J. Blocker (Christian Bale) has been tasked with escorting dying elderly prisoner Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) to Montana. This trek makes up the majority of Hostiles, a brutal revisionist Western that intends to highlight both the unforgivable racism and sadistic violence of the period. Unfortunately, the exploration of both elements could use some fine-tuning. Despite having performers like Wes Studi on hand, the indigenous characters in Hostiles don’t get much in the way of dimensions. This is still, at the end of the day, a Western where White people get the spotlight, rendering Hostiles more subversive in concept than execution.
Even more problematic, though, is that all the on-screen suffering and dialogue about violence (including Ben Foster engaging in a diatribe about a man’s genitals getting cut off) doesn’t end up going anywhere special or interesting. It’s all in the service of basically the same idea as A Million Ways to Die in the West; the Wild Wild West sure could be dangerous. For all the anguish that dominates the story, Hostiles needed something meatier on its brain. Only Rosamund Pike’s supporting character Rosalie Quaid registers as something unique here. Otherwise, Hostiles is a Western with noble ideals that, unfortunately, falls prey to feeling too similar to past entries in this genre.
4. The Pale Blue Eye
Adapted from a book of the same name by Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye is a thriller that imagines what would happen if a weary detective, Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), had to investigate a string of nasty murders at the United States Military Academy in 1830. That time period is important since it allows Landor to bring on the young Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling) as a helper in figuring out who’s responsible for all these brutalities. The Pale Blue Eye comes alive most when it’s centering on Poe, who is here imagined by Melling as Benoit Blanc if he were also a goth twink. It’s not a bad route to take this vision of the author and both its unexpected nature and Melling’s committed performance are fun to watch.
Unfortunately, writer/director Scott Cooper focuses much of The Pale Blue Eye on the exploits of Landor, a much less interesting character suffering from a haunted past and lots of drinking. Key aspects of his storyline, like a lady bartender he sleeps with seemingly just so he has another person beyond Poe to deliver expository dialogue to, are very underwritten and Bale’s performance lacks much of a distinctive personality. Meanwhile, the mystery he and Poe get caught up in needed some extra chills and suspense to keep viewers engaged. There are worse ways to spend two hours than watching The Pale Blue Eye (it certainly gets lively whenever it involves Gillian Anderson in a loopy supporting performance), but even just limiting oneself to Scott Cooper’s filmography, there are also certainly way better movies to indulge in.
3. Black Mass
Cooper has regularly set his tales in rural backdrops. For the 2015 crime drama Black Mass, though, Cooper heads over to Boston, Massachusetts to tell the story of Whitey Bulger (Johnny Depp), a criminal mastermind who was also working as an FBI informant for longtime friend John Connelly (Joel Edgerton). The ensuing story works as a solidly diverting crime drama and especially shines when dealing with the perspective of Connelly. A morally complicated man, Edgerton delivers a strong performance in making you see how this guy could believe this whole crime lord informant plan could work even as Bulger (literally) gets away with murder.
Shot on 35mm film, Black Mass also looks great, with its textures and colors looking like they could’ve fit right into the 1970s crime dramas that littered theaters when Bugler was alive and active. The problems with Black Mass, though, are on a story structure level. Several characters end up getting underdeveloped, including Bulger’s associate Kevin Weeks (Jesse Plemons), who bizarrely gets an entire opening sequence centered on his activities. Some members of the cast are also better with handling a Boston accent than others, with Benedict Cumberbatch, unfortunately, sounding downright bizarre in his attempt at capturing this dialect.
Even with its flaws, though, Black Mass will satisfy crime movie junkies and provides an interesting departure from Cooper’s preceding works in some ways. If nothing else, too, Black Mass was certainly an improvement on Depp’s other 2015 star vehicle, Mortdecai.
2. Crazy Heart
In the years since its 2009 theatrical debut, Crazy Heart has mostly faded from pop culture consciousness save for it being the movie that gave Jeff Bridges his Oscar win. That’s a shame since there are serious virtues to this story about a boozy old country singer sparking up a romance with a single mom (Maggie Gyllenhaal). In his feature-length directorial debut, Cooper shows a remarkable commitment to taking Crazy Heart to dark and nuanced places, including in a realistic ending that refuses to give the protagonist a perfect tidy conclusion.
Best of all, Bridges is truly remarkable in the lead role, injecting his character with years of weariness and experience just from the way he walks around a room. In a career full of unforgettable turns, Bridges delivers some of his most distinctive and detailed work ever in Crazy Heart. Gyllenhaal and Colin Farrell also get to deliver memorable supporting turns while the film’s soundtrack features a variety of country tunes that are bound to get stuck in your ear. Crazy Heart can’t help but fall down some predictable narrative paths, but it’s certainly a movie that deserves to be known for more than one (undeniably exceptional) lead performance.
1. Out of the Furnace
Out of the Furnace left little in the way of an impression either at the box office or on major award shows when it dropped into theaters in December 2013. That’s an outright crime since this rural thriller is the peak of Scott Cooper’s career. Taking place in Pennsylvania, Christian Bale plays a steel mill worker named Russell Baze, whose brother, Rodney (Casey Affleck), just got out of prison. Cash-strapped Rodney eventually goes missing after working as a fighter for the notorious criminal Harlan DeGroat (Woody Harrelson), leading Russell to go on a search for what happened to his sibling.
The screenplay by Cooper and Brad Ingelsby (the latter of whom also brought exceptional rural angst to his writing on Mare of Easttown) injects no sense of hope in Baze’s vengeance-fueled hunt. This is not a Liam Neeson revenge fantasy, rather, it’s a depiction of a man with so few options that going this extreme route seems like the only logical place to go. Cooper commits to the bleakness of the piece, complete with emphasis on how poverty affects the course of one’s life, without ever forgetting the humanity of the people who occupy the frame. A pivotal conversation between Baze and ex-girlfriend Lena Taylor (Zoe Saldana), for instance, aches with the unspoken yearnings of both characters.
Combining that grim yet discernibly human quality with a bevy of great performances, including Christian Bale. It’s great to see him here adhering to the grounded nature of Out of the Furnace by forgoing layers of makeup or an extreme transformation in his body. Reduced to just himself, Bale still excels as a performer slipping into a man defined by loss and desperation. How Bale’s work and this film as a whole slipped under so many people’s radar is a mystery. However, Scott Cooper’s best work as a filmmaker, Out of the Furnace, certainly deserves a second wind of life.
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