Between the time when Michele Civetta finished making his film "The Gateway" and when arrived in theaters, the whole world of movies changed.
"We wrapped production in 2019," the director and co-writer says. "We finished the film with the sound mix roughly one week before COVID basically started in the U.S."
A combination crime drama and redemption story, "The Gateway" arrives Friday in theaters and on demand. It arrives Tuesday on Blu-ray and DVD.
While the film was being made, a release schedule like that was unthinkable. A movie would open in theaters and continue playing there until audiences stopped showing up. After a few weeks, it would show up on cable and online, and only after that would it be available for retail sales.
That was then. This is COVID.
Civetta, who previously made the little-seen and lightly regarded "Agony," had hoped to bring "The Gateway" to the Cannes Film Festival, but the Cannes Film Festival was canceled. He'd hoped to bring it to the Venice Film Festival, but the Venice Film Festival was held in what Civetta called "a stripped-down version."
So now the movie is coming out on every platform all at once, over a period of just four days.
The film stars Shea Whigham as Parker, a St. Louis social worker dedicated to helping his clients, even though his own personal circumstances are not much better than theirs. He is especially driven to help keep a mother, played by Olivia Munn, together with her daughter.
Over the course of the film, we learn that his concern about keeping the daughter out of the foster care system stems from his own childhood spent in a foster care institution. His jazz-trumpeter father, played by Bruce Dern, put him in the system after his mother died from an overdose. Parker's relationship with his father has been fractured ever since.
Getting Whigham for the role was key, Civetta says. Whigham has been a prolific character actor for years, winning plaudits for such roles as Steve Buscemi's brother in "Boardwalk Empire" and as Matthew Rhys' sometimes unsavory partner in the remake of "Perry Mason."
"He was the very first actor we wanted," Civetta says. "He became the bedrock of the film. He's such a respected actor's actor. From that point, a lot of people realized that the project had validity. From him, Bruce Dern came on, then Olivia Munn."
Civetta calls himself a "huge, huge Bruce Dern fan" and considers himself fortunate to have secured the services of the twice-Oscar-nominated actor.
One name in the credits is little known, but maybe not for much longer. Taegen Burns plays Munn's daughter, who is supposed to be perhaps 12 years old. She is startlingly natural in the role.
"Honestly, I feel like you can't take credit for these things," Civetta says. "She's been in a handful of really good projects — but talk about a discovery! She just nailed it."
The film is fairly dark in tone, with spasms of violence. Whigham's character, Parker, wants to do what is right but is occasionally fighting with demons of his own. He drinks too early and too often, takes drugs and, in one scene with actor Keith David, reveals that his grasp on reality may be fluid.
"I'm a big fan of the '70s new American cinema," the 44-year-old Civetta says, citing films by such directors as Peter Bogdanovich and John Cassavetes. "('The Gateway') is a genre piece. I was interested in exploring a morally ambiguous universe. No one is good or bad — it's shades of gray."
And for the morally equivocal setting of his modern film noir, Civetta chose St. Louis — which explains the title, "The Gateway."
He picked St. Louis, he says, because, as the Gateway to the West, it is a city at a crossroads. It was at its peak during the Gilded Age, roughly the 1870s through 1900, but ever since has been buffeted by corruption and ineffectual politicians, he says.
"It was a metaphor for where smaller cities are in American at this juncture," he says.
Although the story is set here, it was filmed in Virginia, presumably for financial reasons.
"Yes, I've been to St. Louis, and no, we couldn't shoot it there, unfortunately," Civetta says. "The idea for me with St. Louis was it was no different than (Franz) Kakfa writing a book about America while never spending time in America."
