Friday, Oct. 19, 2001 | 8:48 a.m.
Geoff Carter's movie reviews appear Fridays in the Sun and vegas.com. Reach him at [email protected].
"So what happened to your dad?" asks Eugene Irwin (Robert Redford), formerly a general, now imprisoned for criminal neglect, of prison confidence man Yates (Mark Ruffalo). Yates' father served under Irwin -- as did many of the fathers of the men in the maximum-security military prison to which Irwin has been sentenced.
"He's dead," Yates says. "How?" Irwin asks, and Yates says grimly, "He came home."
In Frank Darabont's "The Shawshank Redemption," another very good film about the impact incarceration has on broken men, the characters speak of becoming "institutionalized" -- of coming to need the protection afforded by prison walls, of being so terrified of the outside world that they would fight not to be released.
In "The Last Castle," the prisoners are already shaped by routine; years in the military have rendered prison as just another dead-end assignment. The inmates seem a moment away from asking, "How do I get outta this chicken outfit?"
Such is Irwin's mindset when he is brought to the Castle, with eight leadership-related deaths weighing on him. "What do you expect from your time here at the Castle?" asks the head of the facility, Colonel Winter (James Gandolfini, more soft-spoken than he's ever been). "Do my time; go home," Irwin says.
Winter admires Irwin, even after the General insults him and questions the way he runs the Castle; there have been several deaths on Winter's watch. "Look how easy it is to control men," Winter says after he starts a riot in the yard. "Someone should write a paper on it."
Before long, the back-and-forth turns bloody, as Winter tries to strip the inmates of the dignity and anger Irwin has stirred in them. But Winter still respects Irwin, and wants to best him in a manner that will win his admiration in return.
"What's to keep me from throwing you in (solitary confinement)?" he asks. "Nothing," Redford says with his patented twinkle, "if you want to win that way." The look of eagerness and fear on Gandolfini's face is a movie in itself.
As visualized by "The Contender's" Rod Lurie, "The Last Castle" is less a prison yarn and more "Patton" in a box. There are constant references to the strategy of chess, from literal close-ups of a chessboard to Winter's birds-eye view of the yard, where his pawns are playing his game for him. The inevitable skirmish is shot like combat footage, with quick cuts and a constantly moving camera.
The yard seems to stretch for miles; it's big enough for the inmates to build a makeshift battlement and for a combat helicopter to swoop around inside. These are the trenches, and welcome to them.
Even if the nation weren't completely upside down right now, "The Last Castle" would be a strange bird -- it asks you not only to respect, but to rally behind, a bunch of convicted felons. I leave it to you to form your own opinion of the men -- hard to do, as the script conveniently fails to tell you what most of the inmates did to get sent to the Castle -- and encourage you to marvel at the destruction of the institution.
I also leave it to you to figure out which institution is destroyed -- and whether these men could ever go home.
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