Disabilities on DVD: "The Lookout"

Disabilities on DVD
With Stephen Snart

The Lookout
Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jeff Daniels, Matthew Goode, Isla Fisher, Sergio Di Zio and Bruce McGill
Written and Directed by Scott Frank
Distributor: Miramax Home Entertainment
DVD Release Date: August 14
Running Time: 99 Minutes

The Lookout is one of the year’s most exciting films; a rousing, supremely entertaining crime thriller about a bank heist. But what the marketing doesn’t divulge is that it’s much more than just a genre picture. In fact, it’s an intense character study about a young man coming to terms with a self-induced disability.

The lead character is Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a one-time high school hockey superstar whose career came to a halt when a post-prom joyride ended in tragedy. He awakes from a coma to find out his moment of behind the wheel recklessness led to the demise of two of his closest friends, a permanent injury for his ex-girlfriend and saddled him with a moderate traumatic brain injury.

Four years later, Chris spends his nights as a janitor at a rural bank outside of Kansas City and his days taking classes at the independent life skills center. His disabilities are predominantly routed in his cognition and mental health. He’ll cry without knowing why, inadvertently blurt out profanity and call a juicy red fruit a lemon instead of a tomato, even though, as he puts it, he knows it’s wrong. He’s also diagnosed with a sequencing problem but his blind roommate Lewis (Jeff Daniels) assures him that he can sequence fine; he just needs to start from the end and work backwards. Like Chris, Lewis’ disability is permanent and a product of his own rashness (a methamphetamine lab explosion in his 20s) and their living situation is mutually beneficial.

Aside from Lewis, Chris finds opposition from almost everyone in his life. His haughty, affluent family doesn’t know what to do other than infantilize him. That is except for when his pompous father (Bruce McGill) takes pride in defeating Chris in a game of chess. “Would you rather I let you win?” he asks when Chris declines a rematch. Even the well-intentioned Deputy Ted (Sergio Di Zio) inadvertently crushes Chris after griping about his own newborn baby woes by callously adding: “You’re lucky you won’t have to deal with this stuff.”

Others try to capitalize on his disability. Whether it’s day-to-day stuff like the bartender who quietly collects a $17 tip due to his diminished mathematical skills or it’s more egregious like what local hoodlum named Gary Spargo (Matthew Goode) has in mind. Gary initially disarms Chris by watching out for him in the face of other opportunists and by introducing him to a beautiful pole dancer named Luvlee (Isla Fisher). After disillusioning him with false friendship and sexual relations, Gary recruits him to play the part of the lookout during his plan to rob the bank at which Chris mops the floors every night.

For as much as there are perfectly executed moments of heist-related suspense (and The Lookout contains a number of taut nail-biter’s), the emotion is always reliant upon the viewer’s sympathy for Chris. In the wrong hands, the character could have easily inspired apathy or maybe even detest considering the horrific car crash that opens the film. When Chris says that he didn’t do any prison time for his accident, another character grimly replies, “You’re doing your time now.” But the filmmakers aren’t interested in damning him for mistaking his youth for immortality. Instead, they present him as a tortured soul in search of self-retribution. One of the film’s saddest scenes shows Chris going to a bar, ordering a non-alcoholic beer and trying to scribble down pick-up lines he overhears from a more confident patron.

Much of the credit has to go to the performance by the tremendous young actor Gordon-Levitt as Chris. In one segment of the DVD’s special features entitled “Behind the Mind of Chris Pratt,” the actor states that this was the hardest role of his career. Normally, such a pact statement like from a 26-year-old actor would elicit an eye-role of pomposity but considering his previous work as a juvenile delinquent in Manic or a child sexual abuse victim in Mysterious Skin, it really is quite a testament to his regard for his role in The Lookout. Also on the DVD supplement, Gordon-Levitt expresses his concern not to make the performance morose and goes into detail about the research he did for the role, which involved spending time with real-life people suffering from similar conditions as his fictional counterpart.

It is worth continuing to reiterate how much of the film’s strength resides in its characters because it’s so rare to find characters with this depth of complexity in contemporary American genre cinema. Even the most minor of characters in the film is bestowed with careful detail. Consider a party scene in which the camera takes the time to focus on a young mother calling her child with the news that “Mama will be back in three weeks” or a dementia-addled grandfather who creeps into the room on a walker for a moment before being ushered out of sight. The one weak link in the film is the character of Luvlee, an utter cipher of whom neither the writing nor the performance give enough evidence to know whether she is a calculating femme fatale or a bubbly, air-headed victim of persuasion.

A much better example of a supporting character is Lewis. If The Lookout had been produced by a big studio (although the $16 million allocated by Miramax is still sizable), the character of Lewis would have almost certainly been excised from the script under the economy of character ethos as he serves no direct benefit to the ‘plot.’ Fortunately, the producers understood that the film is a character piece and that the beautiful friendship between Lewis and Chris is one of the film’s most winning qualities.

Curious? More Links:

Monday Movie Review: The Lookout

DVD Review: The Lookout