Every once in a while a movie sneaks up on you that is not just good, that is great. And you wonder why you haven't heard of it. Every once in a while you forget how good an actor is and you see them do something and you think to yourself: Oh yeah, why did I forget how superb an actor this person is. Both of those things happened for me with Clean. I had forgotten just how great an actor Adrien Brody is. I had forgotten how good an actor that Adrien Brody can be. And his tone perfect quietly intense and mournful performance in Clean reminded me that he is among the best actors working in the industry. And maybe it's because he co-wrote the screenplay with director Paul Solet, but the performance and the film fit each other perfectly. Clean has all the elements of an action film, and they would have made far more money, and more of a splash had they made it just another action film, but it never stoops, it never is not true to its quietly intense and mournful essence. Which makes it far more, and far better than a mere action film. Clean is the story of a garbageman with a past. A dark and violent past. Yes, that's the beginning of almost any action film. Well, except perhaps for the garbageman part. But Clean takes place in the ghetto, and it's world is grimy and quietly hopeless. Not the shiny, flashy stuff of action films. Even those set in ghettos manage somehow to be bright and colourful. Not Clean. Clean is the only name we're ever given for Brody's character, and, like many things in this film, the details are left in the shadows. Perhaps he is called Clean because he's a garbageman. Perhaps he has been called Clean for a long time and for other, far darker reasons. The fact that the film is called Clean is deeply ironic, because nothing in or of its world is not dirty, is not grimy and worn out. The character Clean is trying to live a quiet life of relative solitude. I know. That too is an action movie cliche. And, like in every action movie, we know that Clean will inevitably be forced to go back to his violent ways. But the villain of the film, played by character actor Glenn Fleshler, while he is on one hand a typical crime boss, is also deftly and subtly written and played by Fleshler to have depth, little fine glimpses of humanity, of character. And that makes the inevitable clash far more interesting than you find in most action films. And his son, played by Richie Merritt, who some may know from the wonderful film White Boy Rick, while at once the cliche mob boss's son who hates his father, has a humanity to him even in what little we do see of him (In more ways than one...), that belies the simple role he is seen to play. And so, while we know what's coming of course, Clean does it in such a way that is interesting, tragic and anything but the usual. Clean decides to be a great, if difficult, in that it is less noisy and less entertaining in the way we have been conditioned to expect, film rather than a money making easy to watch action movie. Even the action when it comes is brutal in its realism, and, while it is action, is less exciting than it is unpleasant to watch. Many critics would refer to Clean as a small film, since it is not flashy and nothing about it seems big budget, or what Hollywood in completely oblivious perverseness refers to as High Concept, meaning aiming to bring in big box office. Clean is no small film. It just aims to be better than a so called big film. And Clean, no doubt, will garner bad reviews, since it is very much not what you expect it to be. Clean is better than you expect it to be. Clean was better than I expected to be. That doesn't happen nearly often enough. Which is more than good reason to give Clean a chance to sneak up and surprise you too.
Review of Clean
