The Yards (2000)

James Gray's The Yards arrives with the solemn gait of a film that believes corruption is a tragedy rather than a policy failure. Leo Handler returns from prison to the rail yards of Queens, where contractors repair subway cars and rival firms sabotage one another's work to win bids. The machinery of graft is rendered with a craftsman's patience: bribes, Knicks tickets, a Puerto Rican-owned competitor undercut by vandalism, and a backroom negotiation that decides who gets to keep repairing trains for the city. There is a genuine contempt here for the men who trade contracts over the bodies of the people who work beneath them. We are meant to feel the weight of that rot, and we do, in the way one feels the cold in an unheated room. The film is angry at capital. It is not, however, interested in imagining an alternative to it.

The social consciousness on display is of an older, quieter variety. A minority-owned firm competes for contracts, and the plot uses that rivalry as a lever, not as a thesis. Race is a mechanism of the story, never its subject. The women, including Charlize Theron and Faye Dunaway, are given grief and betrayal and little else to work with, and the film does not appear troubled by this. There is no examination of the body, no neurology to interrogate, no climate to mourn, no queerness to acknowledge. The moral reckoning arrives at the end, when Leo testifies against the men who raised him, and it lands as the natural conclusion of a crime drama rather than a sermon delivered from a pulpit.

What remains is a well-built, glum, deeply traditional picture about a man discovering that the system he served will discard him the moment he becomes inconvenient. It is a fine thing to watch. It is not trying to teach us anything we did not already suspect.