You get out of prison determined to keep your nose clean.  Only, your family’s connections are all criminal, even apparently legitimate work keeping New York’s subway trains running.  So, it’s no surprise when you end up in the rail yards one night to discover that a rival gang holds sway, leading to a run-in with a cop who you bash over the head with his own night stick.  Problem being that the cop can identify you, so your pals come up with their smartest suggestion: kill the cop in hospital.

What follows is one of the most harrowing scenes I’ve seen, as young Leo Handler (Mark Wahlberg) dons a surgical mask and looks for his victim.  Being a fundamentally humane guy, Leo can’t bring himself to commit the killing, and flees.  Meaning the cop gets to identify Leo as his attacker.  And the cops storm round Leo’s flat, giving his aunt a heart attack in the process.  Good grief, as Charlie Brown often said in less trying circumstances: everyone’s favourite under-ten misanthrope wouldn’t be surprised by the turn of events in The Yards at all.

This is grim stuff, and the fact that much of the story is filmed in coffin-like wooden interiors only makes it all the more bleak.  Director James Gray, and co-writer Matt Reeves, bring a Shakespearean dimension to the proceedings: it’s easy to imagine the same tale taking place in a corrupt court way back when, and not urban America in the late twentieth century.  No surprise then, that its weighty theme is fate, and the difficulty of a man trying to escape his when confronted by overwhelming obstacles in the form of an oppressive family seeking to protect its own.

Interesting to see what the team who brought us this story in 2000 would do with similar ingredients in 2009.  There’s a cracking tale about economic downturn to be written as a book or film by someone (please not Martin Amis, though he’s sure to reckon himself the man for the job), and Gray and Reeves are up to the task on the strength of The Yards, which bridges the personal and political with aplomb.

In seeking to escape the influence of his family, Leo becomes more deeply embroiled with the powerplay that his influential uncle is involved with.  And matters worsen when his beloved cousin Erica is killed by Willie, once Leo’s best friend and a rival for her affections: this is your actual damnation without relief.

The one aspect of the film that I’m not persuaded by is Leo’s essential goodness.  Once out of prison at the start, and having committed to not killing the cop in his hospital bed, he sticks to doing the right thing and doesn’t waver.  For me, that’s neither entirely convincing as a character trait nor compelling in a story where so much is at stake.  Leo’s sense of honour propels him through the story and leaves him seemingly whole and uncompromised.  It works, but it’s a touch too much in the heroic mode for it to persuade me.

The whole business of the corruption involved in railyard contracting is credible.  I don’t know to what extent the film is based in reality, but it sets the benchmark high for those aiming to create social drama with universal themes.  It works amazingly well: I’d love to see a Ken Loach film that captures the high ground so effectively.

A more recent point of comparison is Gomorrah, which has the moral weight of The Yards but is stylistically very different, utilising quasi-journalistic techniques and a multi-strand narrative.  This is territory which fascinates me, and that I intend to occupy myself in some form in the future; I’ve written a treatment for a feature about military corruption that I’m sure The Yards could teach me a thing or two for, and I have more or less tentative ideas for other stories that this fine film could influence.