In The Guilty (now streaming on Netflix), Jake Gyllenhaal and the director Antoine Fuqua re-team and pretty much shatter the fourth wall for the whole length of the movie. Gyllenhaal plays Joe Baylor, an L.A. cop furloughed from street duty for an infraction we only learn about later, and assigned to work as a 911 responder. This is his final night in the galling limbo of being a cop while not actually being one.
The windowless emergency call center, including only a handful of other stressed-out 911 operators, is walled off from the outside world. Huge screens display TV newscasts showing enormous wildfires raging in the nearby hills, with smoke engulfing the city and irritating Joe's lungs, his shortness of breath only partly relieved by an inhaler.
The city's resources, from police to ambulances, are stretched thin, and Joe's every phone conversation with anxious citizens or harried first responders crackles. Nerve-wracking as the call center is, we can see another sort of trouble written across Joe's face. Something beyond this hellish limbo is eating him.
We can't miss it, because the camera is closing in on the actor, too. With Joe confined to his chair, a large call screen in front of him displaying caller IDs and emergency resources, Gyllenhaal through most of the movie is pinned in medium, close or stultifying tight shots. Fuqua's relentless camera is in icy command. Joe's unraveling psyche is not. The blistering cool/hot cinematography is by Maz Makhani.
With Joe edgy and coiled, and the camera rarely shifting from Gyllenhaal, this glistening movie poses a guerrilla question: Could Gyllenhaal be blending his actor's duress with Joe's distress? So locked and tight are the shots, so maddeningly do the phones hum and buzz, how could he not be? The nervous, pinpoint editing is by Jason Ballantine.
As the night wears on, Joe's woes twist and thicken. Seeking help on one call, he inadvertently connects with his sergeant, who brings up the court appearance Joe is set to make the next morning, where he hopes to clear his name and return to being just another street cop. He'll need the exculpatory testimony of his partner, and a nervous phone exchange between those two underscores the urgency for both men to stick to their story.
Then, critically, an emergency call comes in from Emily (Riley Keough, in a riveting vocal performance), a distressed woman calling from the passenger seat of a van where, she tells Joe, her husband has abducted her and is shunting her to an unknown destination. Without realizing it, Joe must be hearing in Emily's cry for help some faint echo of his own agitation. The hyper crisp sound design, so piercing it’s almost like another character bedeviling Joe, is by Mandell Winter, Ed Novick and David Esparza.
Almost hypnotized by Emily's pleas, he works, via nothing more than phone connections, to collaborate with Emily and set her free. Keeping her on the line, coaxing her to stay calm, Joe recruits police and highway patrol to help in the search. He'll need to figure out where her husband is taking Emily and why, as Joe learns when he calls their home, the couple have left their two young children there alone.
Adapted by Nic Pizzolatto from the 2018 Danish movie of the same name, The Guilty in this Americanized version opens up to reflect the Los Angeles setting and the backdrop of a roiling American police culture. The eerie wildfire landscape provides a vaster sense of unease, and Joe's relationships with his wife and daughter, call center colleagues, police officers and emergency responders stretch beyond the Danish version, impeccable as that movie was.
What undergirds the action and keeps us guessing isn't so much how the story will turn out, though that suspense is palpable enough. What holds the viewer is Gyllenhaal's facial and bodily discomposure as it seems to ripple through him before our eyes.
It's more than Emily's situation that's spiraling out of control. Joe's hold on his own narrowing set of options begins to give way and drop him into a place, and a space, where only he can rescue himself. Jake seems to walk right up to the edge of showing his own composure cracking right along with Joe’s.
This movie gives us the widest, if not the deepest, range I've seen from Gyllenhaal. When Joe pleads with his estranged wife, Jess, for a chance to say goodnight on the phone to their young daughter, the slackness in the contours of his face tell us that Joe has drained his goodwill with Jess to the dregs, that his marriage is past saving.
When he pleads with his partner to stick to their agreed upon story that will clear Joe's name, the snag in his voice, the wary hesitation, tells us that Joe's hopes for acquittal hang by a thread.
When he pleads with Emily on the phone to continue deceiving her husband seated beside her in a van carrying her to what she fears is her doom, Joe begins trying not just to sustain Emily's hopes, but to keep the dying flame under his own from going out. Gyllenhaal's nerves seem to jangle on screen.
As the story comes to a close, the physical space Joe finds himself in is the tightest of the night. And maybe, finally, there's some sort of relief in it, a cold surcease of sorrow, after all.
Without knowing it, we're in medias res in one drama, Joe's plight, while suddenly being thrust into another, Emily's capture. Parallel stories advance side-by-side. Joe versus his estranged wife, Joe longing to stay true to his daughter, Joe and his wary cop colleagues, Joe and his prickly past, Joe and the harrowing kidnap drama playing out before him.
These all take place by phone, intensifying troubles that Joe can hear but not see. He heeds voices, but how well is he understanding them? The controlling truth is that the story’s strands are winding their way around Joe's neck, tightening like a noose. Others in this night story might cheat fate, but how will Joe?
With the towering exception of Brokeback Mountain (2005), I’ve rarely seen Gyllenhaal as exposed as he is here, as willing to let his face and body, not just the words he speaks, darken and unearth a fraught story.
Since Brokeback, only two Gyllenhaal performances I've seen have probed a man in true-to-life peril with a similar resonance, the shattering End of Watch (2013) and the delicate, hurting, marvelous Wildlife (2018).
I can now add a fourth.
I am watching it now. It is a gripping movie but it is a movie I only would watch one time