Word: cops
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...name is Freddy Heflin, and in Cop Land--a sharp-eyed character study and virtuoso acting class masquerading as a violent melodrama--he is played by Sylvester Stallone. This time Hollywood's longest lived action star is not battling Apollo Creed or the Vietnamese or a killer mountain, but his own rep as a stolid, vaguely comic, pre-Modernist hunk-lunk. Freddy is surrounded by guys who think they're men because they carry guns in the big city. But Sly is crowded too--by an intimidating gang of quality thesps, including Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Ray Liotta...
...inability to feel validated," he confesses. "There's a persistent hunger, which is disconcerting and sometimes debilitating. You ask yourself when can you sit back and not have anything to prove? But I do have something to prove." Daylight hardly prepared him for the promise and threat of Cop Land. "I didn't know if I had developed enough bad habits to not work with good actors again," he says. "If you don't deliver, they can't morph good acting. I felt the way Michael Jordan must have felt when he went to play baseball...
...rookie does fine. He leaves the plot propulsion to the Scorsese grads--Keitel as a mob-controlled cop covering up a killing, De Niro as a flinty internal-affairs detective on Keitel's trail, Liotta as a good-bad cop--while he watches, listens, recedes into the wallpaper. Mining his own insecurity to mirror Freddy's, Stallone dominates these scenes with his poignant passivity. The sweet sadness in his eyes reveals something rare in modern films: how much pain and insult a decent man with zero self-esteem can endure. Of course, he and we know he's the hero...
...Cop Land scans like an Eastern Western: High Noon without the clock, or a Shane in which the hero is the homesteader (played by Van Heflin, whose name has an echo in Freddy's). "I wanted to make a simple morality play," says James Mangold, 33, the writer-director whose only previous feature was the low-budget love story Heavy but who manages the complex story and big-name cast with a veteran's assurance. Mangold grew up in a blue-collar town near West Point, up the Hudson from the film's fictional Garrison, N.J. It was filled with...
...going to have this macho-cop competition thing...