Philip Seymour Hoffman in 'God's Pocket'

As it turns out, quite a lot.

Dexter’s novel presents the story of a murder, its immediate cover-up, and its effects on the victim’s family and others who inhabit the fictional God’s Pocket, an area loosely based on Philly’s tiny Devil’s Pocket, a working-class, northern South Philly neighborhood in the early '80s. In both the book and film, the victim is Leon Hubbard, a worthless day-laboring punk who likes to flash a razor around and fantasize about confrontations.

In the film he is portrayed by Caleb Landry Jones, but the actor’s character is disposed of pretty quickly since he decides to threaten Old Lucy (Arthur French), an ancient black worker at his construction site, and has his head caved in for his trouble. The construction crew immediately concocts a story about a loose crane chain that swung into Leon’s head, and the cops buy the story — at first.

At roughly the same time, Leon’s stepfather, Mickey Scarpato (Hoffman), is the getaway driver for a hijacked meat shipment, which will underpin the first of three continuing problems for him — “moving” the stolen meat, finding out for his wife, Jeanie (Christina Hendricks), what really happened to her son, and — oh, yeah — actually burying Leon.

Backing up Hoffman and Hendricks are John Turturro as Arthur Capezio, the buddy who brought Mickey into the heist, and Richard Jenkins as Richard Shellburn, an alcoholic newspaper columnist beloved by the city’s pre-Internet readers, who becomes involved with Jeanie.

Slattery has a fairly unified vision of his God’s Pocket as gritty, profane, and dark, but right out of the gate, his film has problems with compressing Dexter’s long, well-developed, character-driven tale. The murder of Leon, for example, takes Dexter nearly 50 pages to develop but flies by in Slattery’s film as somewhat mystifying. Not knowing the story, a viewer has to wonder why the construction crew lies so readily to cover up for Old Lucy.

Later in the film a similar problem occurs in considering Jeanie’s relationship with the drunken writer. At one point, Slattery even messes up the coherence of the action (involving three characters, only two of whom are breathing). Mickey can’t quite pay for Leon’s funeral, and thus Leon’s body ends up in an alley next to the funeral home, but the viewer is left wondering how that actually occurs — unless the funeral director is a magician.

A black comedy without the laughs

No matter: Leon’s corpse has to end up in Mickey’s meat truck, which is involved in a crash, leaving Leon in the street with a pile of meat. This particular circumstance illuminates another problem with transferring Dexter’s story to film. God’s Pocket is a black comedy, but Slattery’s film is particularly humorless, failing to capture the absurdity of such matters as this crash, which Dexter handles with only a sentence: “It took the police about fifteen minutes to come, and by the time they did the only meat left on the street was Leon.” The only scene in the film that’s actually funny involves the offhand killing of two mob guys by Arthur’s Aunt Sophie (Joyce Van Patten).

Additionally, for Philadelphia viewers at least, Slattery’s choice of Yonkers as the stand-in location for Philly seems iffy at best. It’s impossible not to ask where all the row houses went, and why God’s Pocket has so many hills.

For people unfamiliar with Dexter’s book or Philadelphia, the film may seem a marginal success. Maybe Jeanie’s just in shock after Leon’s death, so she takes up with Shellburn. Maybe a thrown-in scene at the film’s end explains “well enough” Old Lucy’s status among his coworkers. Maybe the acting is actually better than workmanlike. But the term “success” may be like that stretch a first baseman makes that pulls his foot off the base.