The action opens in L.A. during a severe fire season. There are flat screen monitors in the 911 room and the Southland seems to be ablaze. Officer Baylor is an attentive, concerned yet no-nonsense operator. As he tells one slightly inebriated 911 caller who fell off his bicycle, "Call an Uber and don't bike drunk, asshole!"
As the fires rage, Officer Baylor seems to be in for a pretty routine night of 911 calls. That is, until he gets a call from distraught Emily. She's a mother of two. She's been abducted. Getting help to her becomes Officer Baylor's most urgent priority. He wants to get California Highway Patrol officers to her if he can get Emily to calm a bit and reveal details about the van and its whereabouts without tipping off the abductor. Officer Baylor tells her to pretend she's on the phone talking to her little girl as he asks her questions.
He will have to put Emily on hold and deal with other callers. He'll have to talk to co-workers in the office and on the phone. As he tries to get help to Emily, he grows more aggressive in his manner. It's as if ending her crisis has become his obsession. Is there something more to this? We've learned that he has a little girl and a fractured marriage. One co-worker mentions Joe's upcoming court date. Another mentions a psychologist. As the fires rages in Southern California, a fire rages in Officer Baylor's soul. He will be faced with having to go through that fire in order to do the right thing. THE GUILTY, based on a German film, was directed by Antoine Fuqua. Fuqua directed Denzel Washington to an Oscar win for TRAINING DAY (2001) and he also directed him in THE EQUALIZER (2014). We don't get action scene like in those two movies because we never go outside the 911 dispatch floor. We never see the callers. But that doesn't mean THE GUILTY lacks intensity. Here's a trailer.
Gyllenhaal is in every scene of this feature. The camera stays mostly on him and much of his acting is done in close-ups. We see maybe 3 or 4 other people -- all office co-workers. He has to carry the film alone in scenes, reacting to the emotions and situations of the other person on the phone. It's rather like Ingrid Bergman in THE HUMAN VOICE (1966) and Sophia Loren in HUMAN VOICE (2014). Jake Gyllenhaal delivers an impressive performance. Some callers are voiced by Ethan Hawke, Paul Dano, Peter Sarsgaard and Da'Vine Joy Randolph.
Before BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, I saw him in 1999's OCTOBER SKY. It's a moving, inspirational film that I recommend. 2005 showed his acting range in his two big releases. He played characters at opposite ends of the scale. He was the gentle, low-income, under-educated young ranch hand who just wants to live a quiet life with the man he loves in BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. In JARHEAD, based on a memoir, he plays the suburban, college-educated guy who just wants to screw his girlfriend, becomes a U.S. Marine sniper and wants to shoot enemies in the Gulf War. He's chilling in NIGHTCRAWLER (2014) as the unbalanced man who comes to personify the dark side of sensationalism in local news coverage for the sake of ratings and income. He's was very good singing and doing comedy as a guest host on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE.
I still feel that if this was the 1930s/1940s, decades in which Hollywood studios ruled, a top studio would've signed him and starred him in musicals with him introducing new tunes like Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Dick Powell did. Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford (now the sitcom star of B POSITIVE on CBS) starred on Broadway in a revival of Stephen Sondheim's SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE. Last year, during the pandemic lockdown, they sang a duet online from the show to honor Sondheim's birthday.
THE GUILTY runs about 90 minutes and it's on Netflix.
No comments:
Post a Comment