The Drop

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: Michaël R. Roskam/Starring: Tom Hardy, James Gandolfini and Noomi Rapace

Based on a short story by Dennis Lehane, The Drop is a taut, gritty drama that sustains an atmosphere of anxiety and relentless dread. Director Michael R. Roskam keeps the story burning at a white-hot pitch while Tom Hardy, James Gandolfini and Noomi Rapace match the film's intensity with bravura performances.

Tom Hardy plays Bob Saginowski, who, with his cousin Marv (the late, great James Gandolfini), run a bar that operates as a drop-off for Chechen mobster's ill-gotten money. The bar's former owner was Marv himself; a once-respected and feared underworld figure whose subservient status as the Chechen's safety-deposit box causes not a little pique. Bob and Marv are no strangers to the dangerous and deadly world around them, but one can't help but feel unnerved as they do when the very menacing Chechens come to collect the drops.

After the drop money is robbed one night at the bar, we learn the heist was arranged by Marv himself as a prelude to a bigger score he has planned. When the Chechens learn the drop has been stolen, their terse demand that the money be found carries a tacit threat both Marv and Bob understand and respect.

While walking home one night, Bob hears a whimper coming from a trashcan resting in a residential yard. Looking inside, he finds a pit bull puppy who has been abused and abandoned. The act draws the attention of the woman who lives in the home, who comes rushing out to see Bob comforting the puppy. Bob reaches out to the woman named Nadia (Noomi Rapace) for help, which she reluctantly offers. Nadia balks when he offers her the dog but she agrees to watch him for a few days while Bob contemplates an alternative to keeping him. When Nadia loses her waitressing job, she asks Bob for a job caring for the dog when he's at work, which he agrees to. A romance slowly forms between Nadia and Bob as he begins to warm to the puppy.

But nothing in Bob's world is free-from-threats, for a shadowy, low-life named Eric Deeds (terrifically played by Matthias Schoenaerts, co-star of the acclaimed Rust and Bone) begins asking about the dog; even showing up at Bob's house to demand the puppy's return. Citing paperwork and a computer chip embedded under the dog's skin as proof of ownership, Bob naturally refuses. The dog's batter state is Bob's reasonable rationale for keeping the little canine. When Deeds asks that Bob pay him $10,000 for the dog, he also threatens to have the police intervene, and carrying the threat further, he mentions how he may "forget to feed the dog" once he regains ownership. In time, Bob learns that Deeds is Nadia's ex-boyfriend, which only intensifies an already overwrought situation.

A Chechen mobster breathing down Bob and Marv's necks, Eric Deeds' creepy stalking and a dog imperiled make for a nerve-racking narrative stew. Bob's imminent showdown with Deeds and Marv's hair-brained scheme to steal the sizeable Super Bowl drop dovetail in a climactic finale.

There is so much to like and admire about The Drop. All the performances are exceptional. Tom Hardy is an endlessly fascinating actor. Not only is his Brooklynese accent sound, but he never overplays his character. Bob's superhuman unflappability, seems imperturbable until late in the film. Gandolfini could play men like Marv blindfolded but he didn't cruise through the role. He finds the virtues and moral failings in Marv that make him both sympathetic and treacherous.
Rapace is a specialist in portraying intensity and wounded beauty. Being paired with Hardy seems very natural. Both can play characters whose violent emotions simmer just below the surface.

But it isn't only the principal cast who excels. Matthias Schoenaerts is a scary presence and like foreign actors Hardy and Rapace, handles his accent expertly without sacrificing performance. For the few scenes Michael Aronov appears as the Chechen mobster Chovka, he is difficult to forget and is absolutely frightening. Like Schoenaerts, he doesn't have to actually be violent to leave the audience feeling uneasy and thoroughly intimidated.

Roskam captures the grime of Brooklyn backstreets and a dark, seedy, warehouse district, which seem light-years removed from gentrified Manhattan often seen in the background.

The story isn't perfect but for a short-story adaptation stretched to feature-film length, it holds together well. The Drop isn't only an effective crime film but an ideal herald for the fall film season. It's also a reminder that James Gandolfini's passing was a tremendous loss to the world of cinema.