Woody Harrelson lights his cigarette with a blowtorch in "Out of the Furnace," so he's clearly not a nice guy. He also has vividly messed-up teeth - not the usual messed-up teeth you find on the street, but dramatic movie teeth, gray and encrusted. And he likes getting in people's faces, breathing on them and smiling in his likable- goofy-maniac way that makes you think, "Wait, is this a comedy?" - just before he starts kicking a guy to death.
He plays an evil New Jersey hick - Sinatra and Chris Christie to the contrary, there are plenty of those - who has a crystal meth business and various other shady operations, not to mention a dozen slightly less intelligent evil hicks working for him. Their houses probably don't have plumbing, which accounts for the hygiene. Harrelson and his crew make up a colorful bunch, but they're not the focus of "Out of the Furnace." In fact, they seem to be part of a different movie, a dumb but lively sideshow in the midst of a long, grim exercise in garden-variety pointlessness, disguised as nihilism.
Directed and co-written by Scott Cooper ("Crazy Heart"), "Out of the Furnace" somehow drags in two distinct and almost contradictory ways. It shambles and ambles, seemingly without focus or pattern, from one thing to the next. Yet at the same time, it's predictable, not from moment to moment, but in its outlines. There's an older brother, Russ (Christian Bale), and we know within seconds how things will work out with him and his younger, more rebellious brother, Rodney (Casey Affleck). We also have a pretty good idea that if Russ and the meth dealer (Harrelson) ever met, they would not hit it off.
The film is set in small-town Pennsylvania, a world so grim that even when things are going good, they're going lousy. Russ works at "the mill," in between caring for his father who has a hospital bed in the house. And of course, there are rumors that they're closing down the mill. For at least 80 years of movies, they're always closing down the mill.
As Russ, Bale wears his hair long and has the kind of facial hair that announces to an employer that he's not really looking for a promotion. Russ has other things on his mind, such as his younger brother, who comes back from Iraq eager to make money and willing to cut corners to do it.
For Affleck, "Out of the Furnace" is another in his whiny-weird-Americana series, and he's an interesting actor, capable of imparting loads of unspoken meaning into a line such as "It was bad." But he's undermined by the script. The big character moment, in which Rodney reveals the atrocities he has seen in Iraq, plays like writing, not talking, like the screenwriters thought they had something really fine, but didn't.
The actors can't save it, but occasionally they give us a scene that shows us why they chose to make the movie in the first place. Bale has a particularly well-played moment, in which Russ finds out that the girl he loves, the one he hopes to marry, is pregnant by another man. And Harrelson is an amusing distraction throughout.
Distractions are welcome. At one point, Cooper shows cops surrounding a house and moving in. He intercuts the scene with shots of Harrelson cooking up some meth and smoking it. We assume, from the way the sequence is edited, that the cops are closing in on Harrelson, but they aren't. It's just a trick to impart tension where there is none - none at all.
Out of the Furnace
Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle's movie critic. E-mail: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MickLaSalle
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