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

Meet Columnist Stephen Snart

Stephen Snart is a film critic for The L Magazine and TheCinemaSource.com. He holds a B.A. in Cinema Studies from New York University and is currently pursuing a MA in Contemporary Cinema Cultures at King's College, London. Links to his reviews can be found at fluxingphilosophic.blogspot.com.

Disabilities at the Multiplex: Rocket Science

Disabilities at the Multiplex
with Stephen Snart

Rocket Science


Starring Reece Daniel Thompson, Anna Kendrick, Nicholas D’Agosto, Vincent Piazza and Denis O’Hare
Written and Directed by Jeffrey Blitz
Distributor: Picturehouse Entertainment
Release Date: August 10 (select cities)
Running Time: 100 Minutes

Quirky coming of age tales are a dime a dozen in the world of American independent cinema, but Rocket Science – the story of a stuttering high school student who decides to join the debate team – is worthy of singling out from the rest of the crowd. Feature film neophyte Reece Daniel Thompson plays the lead role of Hal Hefner, a shy teenager who knows all the answers in his English class but dares not raise his hand because of his debilitating stutter. His visits to the school’s special education teacher – who’s only been trained to deal with hyperactivity – prove largely unfruitful. At lunchtime, no matter how often he rehearses: “I’d like the pizza,” when stared down by the lunch lady he finds himself unable to formulate the words and gets dealt with a congealed piece of unidentifiable fish.

His stutter isn’t any better at home, an area just as unstable and unwelcoming as the high school halls. His negligent, solipsistic mother (Lisbeth Bartlett) drove his exasperated father (Denis O’Hare) out during his early teenage years and his kleptomaniac older brother Earl (Vincent Piazza) is fond of berating Hal at any chance. But Earl’s not completely sinister; his anger is suggested to be an expression of the social torment of high school he is feeling himself.

No doubt inspired by the work of Wes Anderson, the film comes equipped with an anonymous narrator who chimes in from time to time. He sets the stage in the film’s opening scene in which we see bowtie clad motor mouth Ben (Nicholas D’Agosto) effortlessly spewing out a carefully constructed speech at the New Jersey State Debate Challenge. The omniscient narrator clues us in that this seemingly innocuous moment in which the top debater suddenly loses his gift of gab will turn out to be one of cosmic interconnectedness for Hal. Inexplicably silenced, Ben is shamed in front of the whole debating community and slinks off into obscurity.

Ben’s former debate partner and girlfriend, the self-assured Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick), is determined to win the next year’s contest despite the setback and thus ferrets out Hal to be her next partner. She’s undeterred by his severe case of stuttering, convinced he has the right kind of brain for the job.
Rocket Science’s remarkable charm is routed in its ability to combine a light and breezy tone with an acute awareness of the caustic realities of adolescence. The film doesn’t offer any fairy tale endings or unrealistic solutions to problems like marriage crisis, teen angst or speech impediments; instead it embraces the harshness of real world truisms while presenting them as obstacles that can be dealt with, if not necessarily overcome.

The humor of Rocket Science is biting but not cruel. Unlike the nasty Napoleon Dynamite (another Sundance success) which ridiculed its lead character mercilessly because of his implied mental condition, Hal’s disability is never a source of the film’s humor. Sure, Hal is put in a few of predicaments squarely designed by the filmmakers to elicit laughter but the audience is not asked to laugh at Hal because he has a stutter but rather because he is simply a pubescent teenage boy. In contrast, the scenes in which his affliction is most pronounced are filmed with stark sincerity to evoke empathy and not mockery: a preliminary debate scene is filmed from multiple angles while the words that Hal is unable to vocalize materialize behind him on a chalkboard.

Part of the reason Rocket Science succeeds so winningly is the film’s protagonist is genial without being cloy. A large part of this is due to the engaging performance by Thompson, who bears the puppy dog eyes and pronounced nose of Luke Wilson and the nubile charm of Lou Taylor Pucci in Thumbsucker. But not to be unnoticed is writer/director Jeffrey Blitz (director of the acclaimed documentary Spellbound) who carefully constructs the film so that his subject is neither pitied nor valorized. Instead he is regarded as an average teenage boy struggling to find his place in the confusing and treacherous world of adolescence.

(Photo above shows that of a young man, dressed in jacket and tie and holding some papers, standing in front of a classroom. Behind him is a blackboard; there are two students sitting to his right.)

View movie trailer here...

Disabilities at the Multiplex : You Kill Me

Disabilities at the Multiplex
with Stephen Snart

You Kill Me

Low-budget late June limited release You Kill Me is the latest offering in the line of “hitman facing a personal crisis” movies - a breed of comedy-drama-action films that create a character with an occupation as intangible and foreign as contract killer and saddle him with more relatable problems like moral angst or divorce. Recently, two very effective comedies – The Matador and The Whole Nine Yards – mined this territory with great results, one through sensitivity and the other through hilarity (Meanwhile in the world of television, The Sopranos reigns supreme). John Dahl’s You Kill Me is somewhat different from the aforementioned titles in that coming to terms with the act of murder is not the film’s central crisis. Instead, the contract killing element has surprisingly little to do with the film, making way for an unexpectedly heartfelt look at a different human disease: alcoholism.

Acting legend Ben Kingsley plays Frank Falenczyk, the alcoholic hitman at the center of the narrative. Early in the film, Frank gets too drunk during an assignment and passes out, allowing an important target to slip past him unharmed. The local gangsters he works for (led by Phillip Baker Hall) ship him out to San Francisco under the strict orders to detoxify before going back to work. He attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings begrudgingly and is loath to give himself up to the group hug dynamic of tearful attestations and respectful attention but after a few meetings he begins to lower his protective shield.

At the behest of his sweet-natured AA sponsor, Tom (a natural role for the affable Luke Wilson), Frank eventually musters the courage to take the podium and introduce himself to the group. He speaks with startling honesty, divulging his identity as an assassin without a moment’s hesitation. During this lynchpin scene, Frank informs his fellow AA members that all he’s ever been good at is killing people. Alcohol has always been a part of his life, he explains, it didn’t used to get in the way of his work but lately it has rendered him unable to perform. With solemn introspectiveness, he proclaims that the only way he can go back to killing people is if he can give up drinking. He doesn’t like the AA meetings but if that’s what can get him to stop, that’s what he’ll have to do.

The screenplay by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (The Chronicles of Narnia) has an acute awareness about the realities of trying to quit an addiction; the AA scenes pack such a wallop that the scribes surely must have attended meetings themselves. In one scene, Tom tells Frank with insightful simplicity, “You just have to realize, bars are no longer an option.” Some of the early group scenes come off somewhat parodic which is regrettable, but as the film progresses, a clear respect for Frank’s quest to stay on the wagon makes itself evident. Kingsley, whose accent is as ambiguous as the film’s dark humor, has the gravitas to pull off the stirringly effective AA scenes in a way that few living actors can accomplish.

Unfortunately, when the film strays from the subject of alcohol, it often falters, zigzagging in all directions the way a drunk might stumble home from a bar. While Markus and McFeely exhibit a clear knowledge of alcoholism, they know far less about the business aspect of organized crime. Thus, the film’s plot continually gets in the way of the character’s quest for redemption. The needlessly complex and yet inherently empty scenes concerning rival Buffalo crime syndicates adds nothing to the film other than some logical inconsistencies. A stakeout scene in a quiet house has neither the wit nor the tension of an episode of The Sopranos.

But the undeniable fact of the matter is that the film is ultimately a strong look at the effects of alcohol. It has the power to be both a harbinger for those just embarking down that road and also a motivational tool for those seeking help. As opposed to the bleak fatalism of Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas, You Kill Me offers a hopeful tale of unlikely redemption.