In Defense of the "Mid" Streamer
In Defense of the "Mid" Streamer
'Wolfs' is a capital-M Movie, starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt as dueling fixers, and that's a good thing.
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If you remember the James Cameron Aliens pitch, you can probably imagine how Wolfs came to be. That’s essentially the entire premise: George Clooney and Brad Pitt play dueling fixers, a la The Wolf from Pulp Fiction, who show up to fix the same problem. Get it? They’re lone wolves. Only they’re together, which lone wolves aren’t supposed to be. Hence, “Wolfs.” It’s an awkward plural, just like these two!
Okay, maybe the James Cameron story (Alien, plus an S on the end that he drew lines through to make a dollar sign) is the better explanation. Either way, Clooney and Pitt haven’t worked together since the Oceans trilogy ending in 2007, and their one scene together in Burn After Reading (2008), so putting them together again makes for an easy hook. Famous people we like separately, teaming up. Wolfs writer/director Jon Watts directed three Spider-Man movies for Marvel, so he clearly understands the commercial calculus of “more famous people better.”
The interesting thing about Wolfs, and ultimately probably its saving grace, is that it’s studiously grounded. One stylistic choice Soderbergh popularized in the Ocean’s movies — zooming the movie timeline from recon to heist and back again with snappy montages — has spawned countless lesser imitators, most of them dull. It’s harder to be invested in the stakes of a scene when you keep popping in and out of it, and glossing over so many of the details. Present-tense is where the tension is, and that’s almost entirely where Wolfs takes place. The here and now, no tricks. It’s not fancy, but it works.
Meanwhile, Clooney and Pitt both eschew shtick, much more so even than in the Ocean’s movies (remember Pitt’s character always eating?) or even Burn After Reading (which is one of my most-frequently-referenced movies, but could never be called understated). Just looking at the poster, you expect the kind of winks and smirks that, for the most part, never come (thankfully). Wolfs ends up feeling like a solid yarn, well spun. It’s a neat little pulpy throwback utilizing every ounce of its stars’ charm, and easy to call “mid.”
But am I the only one who misses “mid?” A film that aspires to a tight 90 and achieves it is something to be celebrated. (Fine, Wolfs is actually 108 minutes, but spiritually it’s a tight 90).
The situation: a Manhattan DA played by Amy Ryan is in her penthouse hotel suite with a dead body — a kid she picked up at the hotel bar who took some drugs and then fell off the bed into glass bar cart, bleeding all over the nice hardwood and her smart blouse. What to do? She calls a mysterious number in her phone, represented only by two brackets with nothing in between. Before she can say “room service,” George Clooney is at her door in a smart turtleneck. He begins to gruffly assess the situation. But before he can say “Chappaquiddick,” a rival fixer in the form of Brad Pitt, wearing the same amount of leather and with hair even more tastefully tousled shows up for a duelling assessment. (Wolfs? More like Silver Foxes!)
Clooney works for Amy Ryan’s character, the DA; Pitt’s for a voice on the other end of the hotel telephone, the hotel manager, who wants to keep this whole thing quiet for the sake of her hotel’s clean reputation. IMDB lists Clooney as “Margaret’s Man,” and Pitt as “Pam’s Man.” Pam quickly determines that the two, now both aware of the situation all parties hoped to keep quiet, should just work together. The running joke is that while the two have never met nor knew of each other’s existence, they have exactly the same job and are exactly the same Type of Guy. The other running joke is that they keep referring to a “dead prostitute,” while Amy Ryan keeps insisting “he’s not a prostitute!” (Classic bit).
Amy Ryan is one of the few actors alive capable of convincingly playing a maternally-aged woman horny enough to pick up a drunk kid half her age for sex and not have it come off creepy or weird or make you suspect there’s something else going on. Wolfs is, at its heart, a film about loneliness, and few can do relatably lonely like Amy Ryan. She’s only in the movie for about five minutes and you wish it could be more. But when isn’t that true of an Amy Ryan role?
Soon, wouldn’t you know it (and I don’t think this is spoiling too much), on their way to dispose of a body, the body wakes up. Clooney and Pitt quickly get caught up in a rapidly escalating situation involving a drug mule, four kilos of stolen drugs, and the Albanian mafia (it’s always someone from the Balkans, isn’t it? It’s like screenwriters figure that the Soviet villains of the Cold War and the Islamic villains of the War on Terror are both too hack and so they split the difference). As good as Clooney and Pitt are as frenemy fixers, and Amy Ryan is as a horny lonely career woman, Austin Abrams might steal the show as a kid who’s so dumb and in so far over his head that you can’t help but feel for him. He ends up wearing women’s clothes meant for Amy Ryan for half the movie, and the fact that they sort of fit make him all the more pitable a fool. He looks like a mournful ostrich.
If dueling fixers is the hook, Wolfs’ operating trope is that two avowedly self-interested, amoral anti-heroes seem to be building up to do something good for once in their lives, possibly as a final act of redemption. They’re bad guys choosing to be good; guys who hate each other becoming friends! These are tropes for a reason: they’re gratifying to watch. It’s easy to bash Wolfs for not doing anything “new,” for not having more time for the female characters, or for not being enough of a “romp.” But balance and restraint are the big reasons it works, and why it’s something of a rare treat these days. It’s a slick premise that succeeds by being just clever enough, and for never overstretching your willful suspension of belief.
Clooney and Pitt play two impossible cool, off-the-grid career criminals of the kind the movies have consistently conditioned us to believe exist (if Hit Man did anything well, it was skewering that mythos). The twist is that in Wolfs, beneath the surface, these two are also lonely dudes getting older without much to show for it, complete with sore backs (a plot point I love).
This is what all good pulp does: start with a hooky, tropey, possibly even slightly high concept premise, and then gradually turn the realism dial until you find yourself buying in. As Don Draper says in the opening episode of Mad Men, what people want more than anything is to be convinced that what they’re already doing is actually good. Good pulp writing helps you buy into a premise you wanted to believe in the first place. Two cool guys becoming friends; why couldn’t it happen?