The “fixer” or “cleaner” is a great stock character in crime shows and movies: the guy you call when a problem needs to go away — a dead body, for instance. This guy arrives discreetly, surveys the scene, says “Listen carefully, here’s what I need you to do” and then gets to work. Soon enough, it’ll be like it never happened.
Popular examples include Mike Ehrmantraut from “Breaking Bad,” the title character in “Ray Donovan” and Harvey Keitel in both “Pulp Fiction” and “Point of No Return.” Jodie Foster plays an honorary female version in “Inside Man,” but the trope is otherwise a masculine endeavor.
This character is more effective the less viewers know about him. His reputation as the best in the business comes from years of doing the same work offscreen. His aura of mystery is central to his legend, so the idea of him carrying an entire movie is a bit unconventional.
“Wolfs,” written and directed by Jon Watts and released over the weekend on the Apple TV+ platform, is premised on a low-hanging joke: What if two fixer characters accidentally showed up at the same cleanup job?
This concept never stopped being funny to me across the film’s brisk run time, although it could not have worked without casting George Clooney and Brad Pitt, both icons of manly self-containment, as the pair of nameless, competing cleaner-uppers.
Late one night, Clooney’s character is summoned by a district attorney (Amy Ryan) whose young male companion — not a prostitute, she insists — met an untimely end in her hotel room. Lone Wolf One barely has time to snap on the rubber gloves and break out the corpse-removal tarp before a second expert (Pitt), hired by the hotel, arrives for the same purpose.
Neither guy knows the other, despite their overlapping connections in the New York underworld, which suggests the profession is not unionized. Macho posturing ensues as both wolfs/wolves scrutinize each other’s tactics and try to out-handsome one another. (It’s a tie.)
They are well-paid for a reason: The kid on the floor (Austin Abrams) is actually alive, there’s a backpack full of heroin in the room, and surviving the night will require two solitary specialists to put aside their egos and work together.
I don’t want to oversell it: “Wolfs” is in many ways a slight offering. The otherwise refreshing swiftness of its script means nobody has an interior life, and the coherence of its plot does not strengthen with scrutiny.
The forced breeziness often underscores how hard it is to make this kind of film look effortless. Each of Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s” movies, starring Pitt and Clooney in similar roles, is a better example of the form. Its minimalism reminds us that “Michael Clayton” (also starring Clooney) had far more depth as a lone-wolf character study.
But for a movie with conspicuously low stakes, “Wolfs” says a lot, perhaps inadvertently, about male loneliness, an acute problem for guys who are about as old as Clooney and Pitt’s characters but usually without the genes or resources to age quite so impeccably.
We learn nothing about either guy’s backstory or the presumably failed relationships that were either byproducts of the lifestyle or were its impetus. Without much context, the script indicates that the idea of vulnerability threatens their confidence just as much as warehouses full of armed Albanians. (Why is it always Albanians?)
Whenever the men appear on the verge of saying something revealing, they instead defuse the emotional tension with a joke or a megawatt grin.
I can’t decide if that’s a wasted opportunity or if it’s the whole point. By now, so many studies have noted the destructive effects of midlife solitude, particularly for men, that the whole lone-wolf “fixer” archetype has started to feel like a metaphor.
The solution, most research indicates, is companionship: forming and maintaining friendships based on shared interests.
Easier said than done past a certain age, but they could start by giving each other a ring the next time one of them needs to chop up a body.