EXCLUSIVE: Trailer for 'What Doesn't Kill You'

Pay attention, Oscar-watchers: "What Doesn't Kill You" could well be the best 2008 awards hopeful that you've yet to see or hear about but still might.

The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September and was greeted with rave reviews. Peter Brunette of the Hollywood Reporter, for instance, wrote: "We've all seen this film before — two hoodlum friends from the tough, violent streets of South Boston trying to cope with the lure of easy money and the offsetting threat of jail time — but we've never seen it this well done. With Mark Ruffalo and Ethan Hawke registering personal bests in the performance category as well as playing magnificently and ultraconvincingly off each other, 'What Doesn't Kill You,' a true story that is powerful and completely riveting from beginning to end, clearly is one of the best films at Toronto this year."

So why haven't you heard more about the film since then? There are a number of possible reasons: perhaps because its stars are actors first and celebrities second ... or because its co-writer and director (ex-con Brian Goodman), upon whose life the film is based, has never before directed a movie and is therefore still largely unknown ... or because people doubt that there can be another good movie set in and about life in the rougher neighborhoods of Boston (following "Mystic River," "The Departed," "Gone Baby Gone") ... or because it's being distributed not by a major studio, but by a teeny-tiny indie (Yari Film Group, which is starting to push Ruffalo for best actor and Hawke for best supporting actor). Still, at the end of the day, if people actually check out "What Doesn't Kill You," I think it might just catch on.

I saw the film several weeks ago on a screener and then again with an audience at a special screening, after which Ruffalo and Goodman — two of the classiest guys I've ever met in this business — joined me for one of The Envelope's first east-coast "Contender Q&A" events. The video will be posted on this site soon, but for now you'll have to take my word that the audience connected with the film in a major way. I think this is in no small part because, like many of the very best gangster films of the '30s — particularly "The Public Enemy" (1931), "Manhattan Melodrama" (1934) and "Angels with Dirty Faces" (1938) — it may seem to be about crime, but it's really about friendship, family and the struggle to overcome personal demons of the sort that can keep one from ever really living a "normal" life. (As Hawke's character says to Ruffalo's in the film, "What are we gonna do? Get a job? Huh? It's like standing in mud. Thirty years go by and you're dead. You wanna live like that?")

Anyway, I encourage you to check out the film's trailer at the top of this post — which is available exclusively on this blog, for the moment — and then the film itself on Dec. 12. After all, as the saying goes, "What Doesn't Kill You" only makes you stronger...

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Photo: Ethan Hawke and Mark Ruffalo in "What Doesn't Kill You." Credit: Yari Film Group.

Comments

[JacksOrBetter]

The "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" of 2008? (Mind you, I mean that in a good way.)