Movie Review : ‘Uniform’: When Acting Becomes Reality

A good idea is hard to find--particularly in the movies. “A Man in Uniform” has a pretty terrific one: Henry Adler (Tom McCamus), a mousy bank clerk and sometime actor, gets a role as a brutal cop in a TV series and allows the role to take over his personal life. He wears his police duds at home and on the streets, where he’s accepted by real officers and baited and cajoled by unknowing citizens. He takes part in a robbery and drug bust, all the while detaching more and more cleanly from what paltry reality he once possessed.

A lot of the film, which was written and directed by David Wellington, plays out in long slow shadowy passages where we’re supposed to enter into Henry’s fugue state. The problem is that Henry--whose cop name is Flanagan--is a blank; his fixations and emotional contradictions, such as his passive demeanor and livid temper, are too clinical to engage us. Wellington thinks that by training his camera on Henry’s closed-off mug he’ll open up his mind for us, but it doesn’t happen.

The filmmaker’s model is undoubtedly Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” to which it owes a large debt, but that film was raw where this one is freeze-dried. When Henry talks to himself menacingly in a mirror or speaks to an actress playing a prostitute (Brigitte Bako) about the “scum” in the city, he’s not palpably scary the way De Niro’s Travis Bickle was. McCamus is a capable actor, but he’s given very little to work with. He’s playing a strenuous cipher.

What makes the film watchable is the way it portrays the creepy, powerful feeling a weak man can acquire wearing a police uniform. Henry is a Method actor in the extreme: He lets the Method take over his matter. And there are a few sequences, such as the one where he comes upon a scene of police brutality and stands there fixated--simultaneously fascinated and sickened--that have real power. “A Man in Uniform” is best when it’s not trying to hook us with fancy life-imitates-art philosophizing and just gets into Henry’s uneasy mimicry. The film brings out the pathology in play acting.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: It includes several bloody shootings, back - alley sex and strong language.

‘A Man in Uniform’

Tom McCamus: Henry Adler

Brigitte Bako: Charlie Warner

Kevin Tighe: Frank

An Alliance Communications and Miracle Pictures presentation of a Miracle Pictures Production. Director David Wellington. Producer Paul Brown. Executive producer Alexandra Raffe. Screenplay by David Wellington. Cinematographer David Franco. Editor Susan Shipton. Costumes Beth Pasternak. Music Ron Sures and the Tragically Hip. Production design John Dondertman. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

* At the Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles. (310) 478-6379.