“The Lookout”Miramax FilmsWritten and directed by Scott FrankStarring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Matthew Goode, Jeff Daniels, Isla Fisher, Sergio DiZio and Greg DunhamRated R/98 minutesOpened March 30, 2007Three-and-a-half out of four stars
The tradition of film noir will never die. Logically, it’s a relic of the past — a time when illicit sexuality, morally ambiguous protagonists and casual portrayals of heinous crimes were still taboo.
Those things are commonplace these days, but noir persists. It’s been combined with other genres now — the Western noir, the sci-fi noir, etc. — but perhaps more accurately, it’s a style that has become ingrained in American moviemaking itself. Look at just about anything that the Coen Brothers or David Lynch have ever done.
It’s at the very heart of the culture, and filmmakers continue to find ways to revitalize it: “Chinatown” in 1974, “Blood Simple” a decade later, “Pulp Fiction” a decade after that. More recently, there was “Sin City” in 2005 and “Brick” last year.
Screenwriter Scott Frank has been dabbling in different noir stylings for years now, from the great Elmore Leonard adaptations “Get Shorty” and “Out of Sight” to Steven Spielberg’s brilliant futuristic neo-noir “Minority Report” and Kenneth Branagh’s “Dead Again.”
His latest effort finds him behind the camera for the first time, and “The Lookout” provides the genre with another shot in the arm.
Amid echoes of the Coen Brothers, Elmore Leonard and Cormac McCarthy, “The Lookout” weaves a traditional but distinctly seductive heist story in the middle of an eerily quiet Missouri town. Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is at the center of the story, but he’s hardly the brains of the operation. On the contrary, he’s an unwitting stooge taken advantage of through charm and flattery.
He has a head condition. He used to be a high-school hotshot, a star hockey player and ladies’ man whom even the older kids looked up to. But in an absolutely beautiful car-crash scene that opens the film, he loses it all. He can function just fine, but he gets confused?he forgets things. He has to write himself notes just to get through the day. His motor skills are a little shaky. Gordon-Levitt is quickly turning into an excellent leading man (at least on the indie circuit) and he provides us with a poignant hero. Every now and then, you can see some of Chris’ old persona pop out, only it’s tempered with uncertainty now. He’s not who he was.
But when a guy from his old school conveniently meets him one day — accompanied by the obligatory saucy femme fatale (Isla Fisher) — befriends him and eventually brings him on a lucrative robbery, Chris gets tempted into what he sees as his only way to escape the life he’s stuck in.
The guy’s name is Gary (Matthew Goode, who broke out with a great performance in 2005’s “Match Point”) and he convinces Chris that he could have better, he deserves better and he needs better. And the money in that vault — at the bank at which Chris works as a late-night janitor — is just the ticket.
The film’s tagline, “Whoever has the money has the power,” is thrown around by Gary and is about as generic as taglines get; but in this case, it actually has some meaning. Chris is easy to woo because he’s powerless, or at least perceives himself to be.
He’s out of his element with these amateur crooks, but he wants what’s at the end of the rainbow, even with his blind roommate, Lewis (Jeff Daniels, in one of the film’s many good performances) and a local cop (Sergio DiZio) providing his conscience and, for reasons I can’t explain, making things even more complicated.
The way Scott Frank’s camera creates Chris’s disoriented viewpoint — as he looks around and watches everything, trying to keep all the details and players in place-makes for a slow, electrifying tension paired with the quiet emptiness of the Midwestern landscape.
The direction the story takes may not be anything new, but it sure is convincing. Frank has been churning out excellent screenplays for a number of years now, but maybe “The Lookout” will provide him with more opportunities to expand his talents in interesting directions. This is certainly a good start.