With his directorial debut, screenwriting stalwart Scott Frank concocts a compelling variation on a reliable film noir convention: the protagonist who, due to some impairment (amnesia or dipsomania or some combination thereof), doesn't know who he is, where he's been, or what he's done, but whose past is about to catch up to him with no regard whatsoever for his hapless condition. In the case of The Lookout's Chris Pratt, though, it's the future catching up to him that's his biggest worry.
Chris is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the onetime teen goofball of the sitcom 3rd Rock From the Sun, who's now one of the most riveting young leading men working in what we'll call, for lack of a better term, the indies. He was a shattering teen hustler in Gregg Araki's remarkable Mysterious Skin (2005) and a disarming high school shamus in Rian Johnson's idiosyncratic Brick (2006). His Chris starts out as a high school golden boy; a gifted athlete with a gorgeous girlfriend, a promising future, snazzy friends, and a snazzier car. A remarkably stupid but weirdly well-meaning driving stunt — he shuts his headlights off the better to see the swarms of fireflies on a lonely road in the middle of the Kansas plain — robs him of his friends, his car... and much of himself. A massive head injury leaves Chris a shell of his former self. He's only intermittently functional — an attempt to make tomato sauce, for instance, stalls when he can't figure out which of the utensils in his kitchen drawer is in fact a can opener. He's rooming with Lewis (Jeff Daniels, droll as he's ever been), a blind buddy he met in rehab; they share an improbable dream of opening a restaurant. At nights, Chris, whose well-to-do family doesn't really get him anymore, works as a janitor in a bank. Late one evening at a bar where Chris nurses an O'Doul's and poignantly watches all the other young people around him having normal lives, the tough-looking Gary (Matthew Goode) introduces himself. He was a few years ahead of Chris in high school, Gary says, but idolized Chris just the same. Gary's got a lady friend, Luvlee (Isla Fisher), who was also a big Chris fan back in the day. Thus, Chris starts to get sucked in with Gary and his unsavory circle, which has a plan to knock off the bank Chris cleans.
Aside from getting Chris laid, Gary also makes a few speeches to him about how Chris might get back at the world for having forsaken him by stealing some bucks and pretty much checking out of it. Whoever has the money has the power, Gary says. In the old-school noir pictures that The Lookout nods to — such as Black Angel and Somewhere in the Night — the heroes needed to remember what they did to get to the end of their stories; here, Chris has to remember who he is. For real.
A good deal of the tension of the film, then, derives from Chris's struggles to discover his moral center, and Frank — whose scripts include knowing genre pictures such as Dead Again and Out of Sight (we'll forgive him his most recent writing credit, the abysmal hash The Interpreter, which for all we know might have been noted to death) — deserves kudos for creating a scenario in which that kind of struggle makes for an actual thriller. He proves adroit with pacing textbook suspense scenes — the heist scene itself has a good count of teeth-gritting moments. He is, surprisingly, a little weak with the villains here — Goode's Gary is just serviceable, and the silent, sunglassed, long-haired gang ringleader, Bone (Greg Dunham), is three kinds of boring cliché. Fisher, on the other hand, the comic actress who stole Wedding Crashers, brings some offbeat freshness to what could have been a standard B-girl portrayal. But the movie belongs to Gordon-Levitt; putting across powerful impulses of shame and anger from behind a veil of blankness and befuddlement, he demonstrates that still waters run quite peculiarly deep when they've been forcibly stilled.
Copyright © 2008 Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc.