MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Iron Maze’: ‘Rashomon’ in the Rust Belt

Hiroaki Yoshida’s ambitious “Iron Maze” (citywide) is literally a Rust Belt “Rashomon,” a reworking of one of the two Ryunosuke Akutagawa short stories upon which the Kurosawa classic is based. Transposed to an economically depressed fictional western Pennsylvania steel-mill town called Corinth, the tale does not work nearly as well as it should. But “Iron Maze” is one of those flawed but risk-taking pictures that for film buffs are always more rewarding than safe, easy successes.

The film takes its title from a vast, largely abandoned, labyrinthine mill, where a handsome young Japanese (Hiroaki Murakami) is found nearly bludgeoned to death. A former steelworker (Jeff Fahey) confesses to the attack to the local police chief (J.T. Walsh). As in “Rashomon” the attack and the events leading up to it are presented from differing points of view--of Murakami, Fahey and also Murakami’s American wife (Bridget Fonda).

In its fragmented structure, the picture, written by Tim Metcalfe from Yoshida’s adaptation from Akutagawa, is complex to the point of confusion. Yet the film finally reveals which version is the truth, reducing a parable on the relativity of truth to a conventional mystery thriller.

Murakami’s Sugita is a well-meaning but arrogant son of a Japanese billionaire, Fahey’s Barry is your stereotypical cocky blue-collar stud, and Fonda’s Chris is more cipher than enigma as a young woman who met her husband while working as a model in Japan.

Full of seeming good intentions, Sugita really has no answer--the film doesn’t either--when it is pointed out to him that a man or woman who has been a well-paid steelworker is not going to be satisfied with menial wages.

One wonders whether Yoshida is letting us experience the bitter irony that the steel industry, so crucial to Japan’s defeat in World War II, has now been all but buried in large part by the former enemy we helped rehabilitate.

On a visual level the film is far more successful, with cinematographer Morio Saequsa making the symbolic most of that immense, crumbling mill and the derelict streets of Corinth (actually and Duquesne). What you bring to certain films can be crucial, and this surely is the case with “Iron Maze.”

It helps to be an admirer of Japanese cinema and, in particular, of Yoshida’s first feature, the part live-action, part animation “Twilight of the Cockroaches.”

It also helps to have your own roots reaching down more than two centuries in another steel mill town down river from Braddock and to have once believed that the red glare and incessant clang of the very mill your own great-grandfather once helped run would never end.

“Iron Maze” (rated R for sensuality and language) then becomes ineffably poignant in all the conflicting emotions and cultural implications it elicits.

‘Iron Maze’

Jeff Fahey: Barry

Bridget Fonda: Chris

Hiroaki Murakami: Sugita

J.T. Walsh: Jack Ruhle

A Castle Hill release of a Trans-Tokyo production. Director Hiroaki Yoshida. Producer Ilona Herzberg. Executive producers Oliver Stone, Edward R. Pressman. Screenplay by Tim Metcalfe; from a screen story by Yoshida based on the short story “In a Grove” by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Cinematographer Morio Saequsa. Editor Bonnie Koehler. Costumes Susie DeSanto. Music Stanley Myers. Production design Toby Corbett. Art director Gary Kosko. Set decorator Diana Stoughton. Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (for sensuality and language).