God's Pocket

Featuring one of the last performances from Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Slattery’s directorial debut (you know him as an actor on TV’s Mad Men) is a mixed bag that gets by on the strength of its performances. Hoffman is great as Mickey, a depressed small-time crook whose stepson is killed in a construction “accident.” Desperate to give him the funeral his wife (Christina Hendricks, also of Mad Men) wants for her son, he bets on horses with his pal (John Turturro) and creates more trouble for himself. Richard Jenkins plays a local celebrity author who writes about the neighborhood between screwdrivers, while Eddie Marsan steals scenes as a greedy funeral parlor owner. Slattery captures something interesting and grubby in the neighborhood, especially when the action takes place in a local bar. A sequence involving a dead body in an alley and eventually on a meat truck is extremely well done. Not a great movie, but it does show that Slattery is a competent director, and the Hoffman performance is very much worth seeing.