And now, to paraphrase, for something completely different: a 1st rate B movie (pretending these still exist). I checked twice to make sure The Forger didn't go straight to DVD. It didn't, it was released in theatres last month, after being premiered at last year'' Toronto International Film Festival, to no press buzz that I recall. I hope it does as well as I think it deserves.
The Forger tells the story of Raymond Cutter (John Travolta) who, serving a sentence for art forgery, has a gangster friend bribe a judge so that he can get out on parole early to spend time with his teenage son Will (Tye Sheridan), who has stage 4 brain cancer and not much longer to live. In exchange for the service rendered, Raymond has to resume his criminal career, thought the elaborate steal and substitution by a forgery of a Manet which will in turn be handed to big shot South American Mafiosi so as to let said gangster of the hook from same, for unaccounted and immaterial reasons. The films tracks Travolta's balancing act between his son, the gangsters, the junkie mother of his son ( who had never seen him and whom Travolta convinces to met him), and his own father, a retired Irish small time crook who took care of Will while Ray was in jail (Christopher Plummer).
The Forger is about one hour working class Boston social drama morphing surprising but successfully into heist movie in the last 45 minutes or so. It starts as something Ben Affleck or David Fincher might have directed, humbler in tone but not less effective, and ends somewhat like Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963). It has been universally blackballed (I mean, I've checked IMDb, Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes and Wikipedia), I don’t understand why. Martin´s workaday TV experience serves him perfectly (maybe more so in the 1st part than in the 2nd) and Plummer and Travolta have one of the, if not the, roles of their lifetimes. It's easier maybe for Plummer, out of his usual bland gentlemanliness and into swearing Irish hood, one of the films delights. Travolta, who lost a teenage son himself a few years ago, must have related particularly to his role, and it shows, going about as he does wearing a face carved with stoic and selfless fatherly love. The Forger ends sort of happily, and it could be argued that the closure attained, namely through the acquisition of vast amounts of money, reinforces the consumerist/capitalist ethos that Hollywood doesn’t seem to be able to escape even when criticizing, but that would be a bit of a high-brow statement unbecoming so light-hearted a website as The MacMahonian is, so it shall not be stated;)
But to be clear, The MacMahonian loves this kind of film: unpretentious standard productions that result in high enjoyment, the stuff that was the backbone of the film industry back in the day. It may be premature to say Philip Martin is a latter-day Richard Quine or John Sturges, but one thing he is: a director who is happy to disappear behind his film and to guide our look to the story and its characters rather than to the film itself, a work so unassuming it can pass unnoticed. Not by The MacMahonian. The Forger hereby inaugurates the Provisional Top 10 2015.