God's Pocket (2014) - John Slattery

In the gritty, blue-collar neighborhood of God's Pocket, everyone takes care of each other.  Mickey is not from God's Pocket, but he lives there now with his wife and stepson, Leon.  When Leon is killed in a construction "accident", Mickey quickly finds himself caught juggling a series a crisis including a debt he can't pay, a son-in-law whose funeral he can't afford, and a wife  who believes her son's death wasn't an accident.  John Slattery's God's Pocket has a lot of strong performances and a solid, if unspectacular narrative, but unfortunately it's never able to overcome its multiple personality disorder.  God's Pocket is a film full of interesting ideas that never becomes united, struggling to understand what it wants to be.  The film is uneven, jumping from entertaining black comedy to gritty drama, with no cohesive tone to speak of.  This is a film that attempts to capture the closely knit community of God's Pocket, showing the almost tribal nature of these blue-collar towns who view all outsiders as a threat to their community.  This is the most interesting aspect of the film, showing the hypocritical nature of these small communities, using Richard Jenkin's character, a once praised writer from the area, to illustrate their fickle nature.   Featuring a sub-standard narrative that isn't thrilling enough to be engaging, nor comedic enough to be funny, God's Pocket is a film stuck in-between, never fully able to become cohesive on a thematic level.  

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