91 min | R | September 3, 2021 | Lionsgate
Shea Whigham plays a hard-drinking social worker who pulls kids out of broken homes and cannot fix his own life. When an ex-con resurfaces to reclaim his family, the job gets personal. The character study is sharp. The crime thriller bolted onto it is not.
Parker is a jazz musician turned social worker who spends his days pulling kids out of broken homes in Cincinnati. He drinks. He carries his father’s failures like a debt he can never pay. When the ex-husband of a woman on his caseload gets out of prison and pulls her back into his world, Parker decides to intervene. Michele Civetta wants two films at once. He wants a sour character study about a man drowning in other people’s wreckage, and he wants a pulpy crime thriller, and he never reconciles the two.
Shea Whigham plays Parker as a man held together by routine and bourbon. He does not perform the weariness. He inhabits it, slumping through every scene with the posture of someone who stopped expecting good outcomes years ago. Olivia Munn plays Dahlia, the mother Parker tries to protect, and she gives the part a guarded exhaustion that matches Whigham’s. Frank Grillo plays Duke, the released convict, as a coiled threat who needs only a few minutes of screen time to dominate a room. Bruce Dern surfaces as Marcus, Parker’s estranged father, and turns a handful of scenes into a portrait of the abandonment that made his son.
Civetta directs from a script he wrote with Andrew Levitas and Alex Felix Bendaña, and the seams between drama and genre show in every reel. The cinematography saturates the Cincinnati interiors in amber and rust, giving the social-work scenes a heavy, nicotine-stained texture that the crime plot keeps interrupting. Keith David anchors a few scenes as Terry with the low rumble of authority, and Mark Boone Junior fills out the margins as Gary. The score leans on smoky horns to underline Parker’s musician past. The technique is committed. The structure underneath it is not.
The film works best when it forgets it is a thriller and simply watches Parker fail to save the people around him. Whigham builds a complete man out of small defeats, and the drama generates real weight whenever the plot leaves him alone. The genre machinery arrives to give the story a shape it does not need. The interesting movie here is about a social worker who cannot fix his own life. The one Civetta delivers keeps reaching for a gun.