Last night’s movie: The Yards

S t a y   a w a y    f r o m    t h i s    m o v i e.  The Yards seems to have been staged inside sets filled with transparent, viscous goo. The actors speak slowly and move slowly. They react slowly. The camera moves slowly. The germ of a decent movie is in there somewhere and Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix come close to giving us some decent emotional acting but director/co-writer James Gray seems to be fixated on closeups of his actors’ eyes for no discernable reason. Wahlberg was much better in Boogie Nights and The Corruptor; Phoenix in Gladiator as the mad young emperor. Charlize Theron is wasted in the girlfriend role and Gray seems to have tried making her as unattractive as possible with dark, heavy makeup and dark, badly cut and unstyled hair (and even though this movie aims for the working class, Theron’s character and family have money to afford the local hair salon).