Out of the Furnace does an elegant and masterful job of examining the reality of the lumpenproletariat. The men who grind out the essentials for life, but because the labor is so primitive it can be handled by so many, and thus the lack of quality in the essence of the work raises the worker none higher. His ethics are bare. Let us not suppose he cannot think, as any man given the time does just that. Instead, he finds what he does as sufficient. He doesn’t speculate in other words on ways to make money. He simply looks at work as a job for somebody else.

This cycle is not virtuous. And we see this displayed between two brothers and the mistakes they make. the first one loses his girlfriend to another man as a result of an accident he causes, and hears devastatingly that she is pregnant. Clear as any sunny day is the absence of principles in the bottom dwellers of class. Before such pregnancies without wedding vows was reprehensible. But clearly, in the impoverished in society, such sexual liberty championed by the likes of feminism and its daddy leftism have left in consequence a trap, a perpetuation of social immobility, later to be exploited by democrat politicians.

Likewise, the second and younger brother returns from a tour of duty in Iraq broke. The film terrifically does not stick its nose into the political righteousness of the war, but instead examines it from the perspective of a working stiff trying to make it out of the hole he was born into. And because of his masculine avarice for more, he runs into trouble. Beginning with dealing with a local crime boss, if we can even call him that. It is more of a signifier that the world is comprised by who you know, with the successful graced by being enjoined with the more successful than a meth dealer and loan shark. And eventually being caught with the wrong people catches up.

Grade: B