The family that strays together

The Yards (15) | Director: James Gray | Starring: James Caan, Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron | 115 Mins

In James Gray's impressively downbeat drama The Yards, the play of light and dark is handled with the delicacy of an Old Master. From the very first sequence, a travelling shot inside a railway tunnel punctuated by points of light, the film foreshadows its moral direction: a long night's journey into day.

In James Gray's impressively downbeat drama The Yards, the play of light and dark is handled with the delicacy of an Old Master. From the very first sequence, a travelling shot inside a railway tunnel punctuated by points of light, the film foreshadows its moral direction: a long night's journey into day.

This is a New York story, in which crime and family are the uncertain co-ordinates by which the hero must plot his way through the murk. It's loosely based on a corruption and bribery scandal of the 1980s, which resulted in the Queens borough president Donald Manes committing suicide to avoid an investigation, and you get the distinct feeling it's a story that Gray has been longing to tell.

Leo Handler (Mark Wahlberg) is a young, blue-collar guy emerging from 16 months in jail for auto theft. Having taken the fall for his pals back then, he's now anxious to stay clean, if only for the sake of his fragile, ailing mother, Val (Ellen Burstyn). She has organised Leo's homecoming party, and the way Gray acquaints us with their poky Queens apartment and his even pokier-looking friends is an expert distillation of the mother and son's straitened circumstances. Leo, quiet and humbled, would evidently rather be elsewhere, but he has to play the returning prodigal.

The family is there, too, Val's sister, Kitty (Faye Dunaway), and Kitty's daughter Erica (Charlize Theron), whose affections Leo once hoped might go beyond the cousinly. Just as he's asking about the letters he sent her from prison, the lights go out - a power failure, but for Leo, it's the dousing of an old flame, because Erica is now going out with Willie Gutierrez (Joaquin Phoenix), his best friend.

The tendrils of connection don't stop there. Leo applies for a job to his step-uncle, Frank (James Caan), boss of a company that builds and repairs subway trains for the New York transit system. Frank advises him to take a two-year apprenticeship, but Leo needs money now, and the plot begins to click into place when he is adopted by Willie as his sidekick. It transpires that Willie has got rich doing Frank's dirty work, delivering payoffs to city bigwigs and making sure that subway contracts stay in Frank's domain by sabotaging his competitor's rolling stock. (And we think RailTrack stinks).

One night, when Willie takes Leo down to the yards to watch his wrecking crew in action, an alarm is raised: a railway watchman is murdered, and suddenly Leo is being hunted down as chief suspect.

Gray (whose father was a former partner in an electronic parts company) and his co-writer Matt Reeves proceed to lock family and felony in a tight clinch. It's difficult to look at the hushed, wood-panelled interiors of Frank's baronial home and not be reminded of The Godfather, Harris Savides' dark-toned cinematography a distinct echo of Gordon Willis's memorable chiaroscuro effects in Coppola's classic.

Indeed, though The Yards is set sometime in the Nineties, the mood and styling look back to the cinema of the early Seventies, a heyday in corruption and paranoia. It's the kind of picture Sidney Lumet used to make before his movies congealed into preachiness. The Seventies atmosphere is compounded by the presence of three major stars from the era, all of them doing their best work in ages.

Caan (another Godfather echo) is effortlessly sleazy as the scheming paterfamilias, trying to keep a lifetime of greased palms and scratched backs out of the public glare. Needing to make Leo permanently disappear, he mutters, "I could never do nuthin' like that", but the shifty glint in his eye suggests that he could permit someone else to do it for him.

Ellen Burstyn and Faye Dunaway are also terrific, and match up beautifully as sisters. Ellen Burstyn did some of the best on-screen weeping ever in the otherwise negligible Playing By Heart last year, and does it again quite as chokingly here. Her face remains one of the kindest, and saddest, in movies. Faye Dunaway as the formidable Kitty has one outstanding moment, when her daughter announces that she's getting married to Willie, and Kitty turns on him the freezing stare of a mongoose: "When did... this happen?" she asks, as if it were news of some hideous accident that's been kept from her.

The film's other tense scenes involve guns (still not quite as scary as Dunaway's eyes) and Gray's emphatic use of shadow and light. When Leo has to silence a cop who will ID him, once roused from unconsciousness, he sneaks into a hospital ward veiled with screens that glow with a sickly underwater green - just in case we were wondering how Leo is feeling.

Later, he and Frank meet in a derelict warehouse, and once again a power failure shifts visibility between gloom and near-dark. (Howard Shore's music - he also scored the similar-themed CopLand - maintains an ominous prowling tone in these sequences).

There is a further hint of light/ dark imagery when an Hispanic rival warns Willie that his skin will never be light enough for his Irish-American bosses, though racial conflict never develops as a theme.

The Yards at times plays a little dourly, and Wahlberg's mumbling, not-too-bright stooge doesn't always suggest hidden depths of feeling. (His charisma level drops perilously low at times). In the last minutes, the story itself seems to suffer a massive power failure; one gets the impression that the director had several different endings in mind, couldn't decide on one and so tried to bolt them all together. It doesn't really work.

This, however, is the only time the film goes slightly off the rails. James Gray has essayed a mournful, brooding movie about corruption in industrial relations and blood relations, and in most part has pulled it off with a conviction that leaves you both nostalgic for talents past and cautiously optimistic about a young director's future.