The Lookout
Scott Frank made a career in the 90's out of adapting Elmore Leonard novels for the screen, as he did with Get Shorty and Out of Sight. When it came time to cash in that clout and finally push his own first original screenplay for The Lookout, the early word was that David Fincher was slated to direct it. But Frank decided to helm the project himself and go for a directorial debut. And while the movie falls short of where it could have been in the hands of a more seasoned director, Frank still handles his own and turns in an incredibly understated noir with overstated characters.
The great Joseph-Gordon Levitt plays Chris Pratt, who we first see in a beautifully surreal and tense opening scene with him and his friends in their tuxedos and dresses, Chris at the wheel driving them all away from Senior Prom. He wants to show his girlfriend how driving with the headlights off, the fireflies will illuminate the road and it's as if you can literally reach up and touch the stars. As Chris drives faster and faster with no headlights on a country road, fireflies dotting the sky above their heads, his passengers become more nervous by the second and you know exactly what is coming next. This scene is so well-crafted, that it almost threatens to set the bar too high for the rest of the movie. And in a sense it does.
After the crash, which kills two of his friends, Chris is left with short-term memory loss and less-than-perfect motor skills. He's forced to leave little notes around his house to remind him of how/when to carry out even the most mundane daily tasks, a-la-Memento. Just making dinner is a daunting task. What's worse, damage to his frontal lobe leaves him unable to control his anger and curse words at times, and at other times he just tells women he wants to fuck them straight out. Some might call that freedom, but for Chris it's a pretty frustrating handicap in his daily life. Either way, "sorry, my frontal lobe is damaged" has become a new favorite excuse of mine at the clubs.
Chris lives with a blind roommate (Jeff Daniels) who he met in physical therapy after his accident, and works as an overnight janitor at a small local bank. He has ambitions of moving up to the position of teller, if only he can prove to the bank manager that he is capable of remembering what money is, much less handling a lot of it. But his ambitions are met with little interest by the boss. Levitt does a solid job of convincing us that his character Chris is at the end of a certain type of rope, tired of being pitied and dismissed because of his handicaps, which makes it all the more believable when he decides to take an offer by a group of criminals to be the lookout in a heist on his own bank. It's believable because Pratt is thirsty for responsibility and power of any kind. Thirsty to prove his competence at something, even if that includes a little getback at some of the people who held him incompetent. But as the day of the heist draws closer, the morality of his decision weighs on him and he becomes unsure of whether or not he even wants a part of the plan anymore.
Levitt is on point, as usual, but we should expect no less after great performances in movies like Mysterious Skin and Brick. But for my money, the show-stealer here is Matthew Goode as Gary Spargo, the mastermind behind the bank robbery. He creates a strong, charismatic, intimidating character who you could easily see convincing anybody to be a lookout on the heist, much less Levitt's weak character.
This isn't a masterpiece by any means, and to an extent it isn't even as good as the critical acclaim it has already been showered with this year. The biggest flaw for me was that this was not Levitt's best performance. But at the end of the day, the Lookout is an undeniably well-made, suspenseful, above-average heist flick with far-above-average performances from the entire cast. It works best as a character study, and the fact that we never fully know which two friends died in Pratt's car crash allows director Frank to play some subtle mind games with the audience without resorting to an overplayed hand of gimmicks. See this movie. I can't recommend it enough, and although it won't be on my top ten list for the year, I'm sure it will be on many others.
Tsotsi
In my opinion, one of the funniest developments of the last 10 years or so in the movie world is the rise of the "non-actor". Especially in films from South America and Africa, where the method seems to have become somewhat of a new standard. Ya'll know what I mean............in movies like City of God, where the main characters are played by non-actors, regular people from the actual cities and slums that the movie is set in.
The reason I find it funny is because it takes all the air out of this bullshit myth in Hollywood that acting is this exacting craft that takes years and years of school and training to perfect. America is the home of the actor who takes himself/herself too seriously. The dirty little secret is, and always has been, that virtually ANYBODY can give a great performance in a movie as long as they are able to connect with the character and live in the moment when the director says "action". And to their credit, some of our greatest actors have admitted this point for decades, including Dustin Hoffman and others.
At any rate, Tsotsi works as a movie because of a non-actor, the lead character. It works because you have never seen a character like him before, he is as unique as anybody you would just happen to meet on the street. His emotions, his fears, even down to his mannerisms, it's all mesmerizing. Without him in the role, it's possible that the storyline would not have been believable at all. It all rests on his insecurities, because without those his motivations would have been forced and false.
Great movie. I don't know if it quite deserved the Oscar win against so many other great foreign films last year, but it's still amazing.
A Mighty Heart
Another one from early this year, A Mighty Heart is just a great piece of filmmaking. It's the true story of the terroristic kidnapping and eventual beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, as seen through the eyes of his wife, Mariane Pearl (Angelina Jolie).
I've only seen one other movie from this director, and that was 2004's highly flawed Code 46, which I watched on a friend's recommendation and wasn't impressed at all. I admit I loved the tone, but it was so sloppy that I actually remember specifically thinking that the movie would have benefited greatly in the hands of a different director. But A Mighty Heart caused me to second-guess myself on that presumption, because it is so well done, so perfectly woven within itself from scene to scene. I have to assume that Michael Winterbottom finally found his own style with this one, or at least returned to it. This movie has such a distinct style, especially in the way he handles flashbacks and the contemplative scenes where most other directors would beat you over the head. For instance, there's a scene after Daniel Pearl is kidnapped, where Angelina Jolie (playing his pregnant wife) is in a bathtub and you can see her pregnant belly pushing out of the top of the water, and this is inter-cut with quick shots of an ultrasound of the unborn baby. The film is full to the brim with similarly nuanced scenes. It's all very intelligently done and understated, which is a rare thing to see these days. It doesn't insult the audience's intelligence.
One of the best parts about this movie for me was that the true story itself provided an overwhelming amount of sub-text. Almost every scene is flooded with clashing cultures............American authorities talking to Pakistani police talking to Indian journalists talking to Mariane Pearl, a French woman, who is trying to find her Jewish husband captured by anti-Semitic Jihadists. It's an amazing accomplishment for ANY director to translate all of that coherently and make it realistic, especially without depending on hyperbole to shape the minor non-American characters to make them more digestible for an American audience. But here it all comes together beautifully.
I won't even mention the whole "racial controversy" around the casting of this film, because it's beyond silly and not worth anyone's time. It was a non-issue even when it was an issue, and even more so after you actually see the movie. Jolie BECAME Mariane Pearl, case closed. I have seen many interviews with Mariane Pearl, I followed the story when it happened, and it was amazing to me how much Angelina Jolie looked and sounded like her. Even the mannerisms. It still didn't really sink in for me until I saw an episode of Charlie Rose months later, where Jolie and Pearl were sitting side by side promoting the film, and it gave me a new appreciation for the film to see Jolie's real life personality next to the woman she became. Very striking. I would guess that she will get an Oscar nomination for this.
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