Rampart & Woody Harrelson

We just watched Woody Harrelson in a tour de force performance that would have won him an Oscar nomination in September or October, but not in March. He was Date Rape Dave Brown, maybe one of the most complicated characters I’ve ever seen. Rampart, set in LA in 1999, focuses on Officer Brown as he spirals out of control in violence, drugs, booze, many many cigarettes, and one-night-stand women. Dave lives with his two daughters and their mothers, sisters whom Dave had married one after the other. He feels compelled to keep them all together where he can take care of them, despite the harm he does to all of them with his possessiveness. The people in charge of the LA police department are after him, trying to prove that the man he killed a decade earlier was set up by Dave. Cop justice, delivered by Dave on a man Dave knew to be a serial date-rape rapist. Dave counters all their probing by quoting from memory a variety of legal decisions. It seems that Dave studied to be a lawyer and then decided, like his father, to be a cop instead. As I said, a very complicated character. He’s a rigidly moral man as long as people conform to his odd moral code. If they don’t, look out. He tells his daughters at one point that he’s killed a lot of people, bad people. But he’s never harmed anyone he considers good. The oldest daughter, Helen, obviously mixed up and headed in the wrong direction, asks, “What about us?” The movie ends with him considering suicide, facing what will be his release from the force, with his almost certain conviction for his crimes while on duty. This was a movie that despite the darkness of its message was well worth seeing. Who’d have thought that the Woody, the silly young man from Cheers, could pull this one off.