The Lookout

Scott Frank has written a couple of very good adaptations of the work of Elmore Leonard (Out of Sight and Get Shorty). It is therefore not a surprise that his directorial debut of his own original script is also a crime drama, a heist picture set in the plains. Unlike Leonard's underlying sense of comedy, though, The Lookout is a grim and nervous picture.

At the center is a young man, played ably by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who was a high school hotshot but had a severe head injury after a car accident. He struggles to live an independent life, sharing an apartment with a blind man (Jeff Daniels) and working as a night janitor in a small-town bank. Then he meets an old classmate who befriends him and introduces him to a pretty girl (an ex-stripper, no less) who becomes his girlfriend. Of course, things are not as they seem, and it isn't too long before he is told that he is being used for a bank robbery.

This film is very well structured and tightly written. This may sound like a strange criticism, but it's almost too tight, as if it were written while one of those screenwriting how-to books were open on Frank's desk as he pecked it out. The corners in this film are just a little too neat. Consider the scene where Gordon-Levitt goes home for Thanksgiving, and compliments his father on his new shotgun. Hmm, I think Chekhov's law is being invoked there. And they might as well play Chopin's Funeral March underneath scenes with a friendly police officer who checks up on the bank at night when he talks about how his wife is ready to deliver a baby. When I think about what the Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, or even Elmore Leonard would have done with the same story, I'm sure there would have been interesting little meanders and bizarre oddities. Frank gives us the bare bones, straight up, with no chaser, and that's fine, but not tremendously interesting.

The cast is good. Gordon-Levitt is sort of establishing himself as a force in small pictures, following Mysterious Skin and Brick. I kind of hope he doesn't go the Shia LaBoeuf route and end up in some loud blockbuster. Daniels is also solid. I was really surprised to see that the thief who befriends Gordon-Levitt was played by Matthew Goode, last seen as a British swell in Match Point. That he was now playing a Kansas scumbag and was completely unrecognizable is a testament to his skill. Isla Fisher also looks pretty damn good in her role as the ex-stripper.

The Lookout is a fine directorial debut, but for Frank's next picture I'd like to see him take a breath and shake out the jams a little bit.