What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? Or, to parlay this eternal conundrum into cinematic terms, what happens when an amazingly versatile actor is forced to share screen time with a performer so immobile, he makes the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey seem as active as a sports bar on Super Bowl Sunday? The answers vary, of course, but in the case of Training Day, the happy result is that the usually somnambular actor was apparently inspired to raise himself out of his career-long slumber and try to keep pace with his extraordinary co-star. We’re talking about Ethan Hawke and Denzel Washington, and it’s not hard to figure out which actor gets which designation. In film after film, Hawke has come across as a walking monotony, an amazingly listless actor with the ability to suck the energy out of entire scenes. His performance in last year’s contemporary version of Hamlet was arguably his worst: Faced with the murder of his father, Hawke’s Hamlet displayed all the mental anguish of a slacker trying to decide whether he wanted fries or onion rings to go with that burger. Washington, on the other hand, is one of the very best actors of his generation. A hunk who can act, Washington is so commanding a screen presence, it’s hard not to rally behind the forceful characters he portrays. That’s especially easy when he plays heroes (which is most of the time), but with Training Day, in which he’s cast as a soiled detective who’s not likely to be mistaken for Shaft, it muddies the waters and — initially anyway — places audience members in a demanding situation (perhaps too demanding for some; at least two folks at the screening I attended complained afterward that Washington should only play 100 percent good guys on screen).
Washington plays Alonzo Harris, an LA narcotics officer on the lookout for a rookie who has the moxie (latent or otherwise) necessary to join his team of combat-ready street cops. He sets his sights on Jake Hoyt (Hawke), a greenhorn still espousing idealistic rhetoric about putting all criminals behind bars and making sure justice is served and going by the book and so on and so forth. Jake has one day to convince Alonzo that he’s the man for the job (“I’ll do anything you want,” Jake naively proclaims early in the day), but first he has to forget everything he was taught at the police academy.
“That stuff will get you killed,” states Alonzo, who then proceeds to show the youngster the real way to survive on the streets. He forces Jake to smoke a joint they confiscate, maintaining that to refuse to do so in the presence of street hoods would immediately mark him as a cop. He gets Jake riled up by making some lewd statements about his wife, in order to prove the point that bringing personal emotions to work will only end up getting him killed. And rather than wasting his time dragging in a couple of drug-addled rapists, he beats them up and then lets them go, figuring the mean streets will eventually claim them anyway.
The role of Alonzo Harris allows Washington ample opportunities to chew the scenery (especially when delivering hard-boiled lines like “Don’t move or I’ll slap the taste out of your mouth!”), but the actor repeatedly refuses the bait. His performance is all live-wire mobility — some might even consider it showboating — but never does he overstep the boundaries and serve up pure ham (say, the way Al Pacino does on a regular basis). It’s all coiled intensity, and his passion seems to have awakened Hawke from his celluloid slumber, resulting in a performance from the young actor that suggests there might be more here than meets the usually sleepy eye.
For the longest time, Training Day clicks on all cylinders, suggesting this might be that rare cop movie to pay tribute to the legacy of Sidney Lumet, the director best known for sterling “law & order” pictures like Serpico and Prince of the City. Beyond the high-caliber performances, there’s a delicious ambiguity in David Ayer’s screenplay as it relates to Washington’s character. Clearly, Alonzo bends (and occasionally breaks) the law on a regular basis, but he insists to Jake that it’s the only way to practice law on the streets, the only way to nail the big-time crooks rather than just the poor schmucks who serve under them. As much as we may hate to admit it, Alonzo makes some compelling arguments, and it doesn’t hurt to have an actor as charismatic as Washington delivering this dialogue.
But as is too often the case these days, somebody connected with the film — perhaps the producers, perhaps the studio, perhaps Ayer himself — decided that moral ambiguity in a motion picture doesn’t allow that popcorn to settle comfortably in the stomach (too many butterflies trying to get out of the way, you understand), and what started out as tantalizingly clouded eventually comes into dreary black and white focus.
Not to give too much away, let’s just say that all philosophical musings about the moral dilemma in committing evil for the sake of goodness will have been washed away by the third act, at which time the movie sheds all lofty ambitions and reveals itself to be a fairly routine police shoot-’em-up. And it isn’t just the script’s shift in subtext that wounds it: A subplot involving Russian mobsters seems contrived and leads to an unlikely climax, while a couple of plot coincidences further dent the film’s credibility (Los Angeles isn’t exactly a one-horse town, but two of the people Jake and Alonzo encounter on this particular day — at different times and in different parts of town — turn out to be cousins. Puh-leeze!).
Yet through it all, the performances by Washington and Hawke keep us watching. Even after their characters turn predictable, the actors hold us with their raw emotions — Washington with his Machiavellian cunning filtered through a circus barker’s showmanship, Hawke with his seething rage foaming against a wounded puppy dog demeanor. Training Day clearly doesn’t live up to its early promise, but the work by its two leading players is never less than arresting.
This article appears in Oct 13-19, 2001.
