Rick Kain (Skyrocket Productions)
A parkway lined with barren trees; an industrial park rendezvous in the dead of night; a seedy motel. These are among the locales featured in the effective low-budget gangster film The Henchman’s War. Readers of this space may find something more noteworthy in these nondescript settings: the film was shot in and around the Washington area.
Washington native Anthony Greene was making documentaries and short films when he came up with the script for The Henchman’s War. He finished a first draft in a week and, to his surprise, shooting began five months later. With a cast of local stage actors, and actors doing double duty as technicians, you might expect this to be a sloppily made vanity project. But Director of Photography K. Quin Paek does something that you don’t expect independent filmmakers to do: He uses a tripod.
It makes a huge difference. The stark location shoots may be signs of the movie’s low budget, but Paek makes it work. His barren compositions—especially of nighttime scenes—make miniature Edward Hoppers out of a nondescript parking lot. These settings are unglamorous and even boring, but they perfectly convey the alienation of a career gunman alone with thoughts of blood on his hands—and more blood to come.
This is the canvas on which Greene paints his tale of violence and revenge, a neo-noir with a cool minimalist tone. The cinematography establishes the film’s strategy from the very first shot. It seems like a still image at first: Three corpses are splayed across a living room sectional. There’s a gun on the coffee table. A picture-frame mirror reveals a still figure who you gradually realize is still alive. Joe King (Maryland native Rick Kain) has just killed a local politician and his wife, which sets off the movie’s central intrigue.
King is a henchman gone rogue, quietly making the rounds of the underworld, his eyes set on mid-level crime boss Cubby (Robert Leembruggen, recently seen on local stages in Taffety Punk’s production of Twelfth Night). Greene does not take his inspiration from hyperactive, contemporary gangster movies, but namechecks more contemplative genre movies like Cassavettes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and the Yakuza film Pale Flower, and I see a Takeshi Kitano tone in Rick Kain’s quietly seething performance.
Greene’s script is not as strong as his finely controlled direction. The movie’s quiet, searching passages generally outshine the dialogue. But the cast of local stage actors keeps the film watchable. The Henchman’s War was a grassroots production made with the help of friends, but despite its low budget, it’s a solid, sharp-looking movie. I look forward to what Greene and company will do with a bigger budget.
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Written and directed by Anthony M. Greene
With Rick Kain, Robert Leembruggen, Jane Petkofsky
Not rated: Guns kill people.
Opens today at West End Cinema
