Seven Red

Forget Brick. While the high school noir thing was clever and engaging for about 45 minutes, it soon started to drag, and then drag some more. If I wanted to “dangle,” I would go watch Miller’s Crossing, which at least has the value of Gabriel Byrne dead-panning “Don’t get hysterical” to a thoroughly disinterested Marcia Gay Harden, perhaps the most overlooked film one-liner in the last twenty years. No, if you really want to see former Third Rock child alien Joseph Gordon-Levitt knocking out a smart role in a well-written film, go see The Lookout. Gordon-Levitt must have a keen sense of script, in any case. Even if Brick was ultimately over-the-top, it was a smart and original take on its genre, and so is The Lookout.

Gordon-Levitt plays Chris Pratt, a former high school star hockey player living with a brain injury. We first find him driving at night on a Kansas rural road with his girlfriend and two others. He kills the headlights on the darkened road to show off the spectacle of mating fireflies, and, well, there you have your brain injury . What follows can be seen as your standard Regular-Guy-Pushed-To-the-Limit fare, with the usual criminal elements forcing the protagonist to examine his own code and become-criminal, a popular thriller theme from Deliverance to the surprisingly engaging Derailed.

Struggling with his brain injury and taken for a pitiful dimwit behind it, Pratt works as a night janitor at a farmer’s bank. He shares an apartment with another disabled adult, the loud-mouthed but street smart Lewis (Jeff Daniels in an Oscar-worthy performance), who was purportedly blinded by meth lab fumes “before meth was trendy.” Pratt takes day-time rehab courses, and writes in a small notebook as an aid to short term memory. Of course, the combination of his damaged memory and his inability to censor himself means that he leads a painful and lonely life, condescended to his by successful family, and sitting alone at the bar after his shift, drinking non-alcoholic beer and striking out with women. More unfortunately for Pratt, his long-term memory is not in the least bit affected, so he spends much of his time reliving his pre-injury glory, while drowning in guilt over the accident, which killed his two friends and caused his former girlfriend, who he virtually stalks throughout the film, to lose a leg. A sad existence, in other words. But people have designs on him.

Specifically, a pack of thieves led by villain probably not named Gary Spargo have been casing banks, looking for a big score. They want to hit a vault when the large cash reserves come in for the planting season loans, and Spargo is well aware of Chris’ past and disability. Spargo is played masterfully by Matthew Goode, a performance that is all the more astounding when we learn that Goode also played Scarlet Johannsen’s hapless fiance in Match Point. It may be that American Lowlife is a type played particularly well by Brits – from Gary Oldman’s hilarious Drexl Spivey in True Romance to Idris Elba’s jaw-dropping work as The Wire‘s Stringer Bell – but Goode’s transformation from snooty British tennis aristocrat to charming Kansas faux populist sociopath is truly remarkable. I’m scared to see his upcoming work in Brideshead Revisited! The gang lures sad sack Pratt in with sex and companionship, but inevitably turns matters to the impending heist. Of course, the best laid plans will go awry (the actual process of the plan unraveling is detailed, nuanced, and well-constructed, which is to say, writer and director Scott Frank doesn’t take the audience for fools), and Pratt has to face his own capacities in dealing with unfolding chaos.

This is all fairly standard as far as the genre goes. The two interesting elements that add to the film, I think, are the role of disability and the role of writing. These elements are woven together nicely through Pratt’s specific brain-injury consequence: he is unable to sequence. Essentially, his capacity to narrate events is limited; we find him at the outset struggling to write a simple narrative of his usual routine. There’s something very moving about this scene, which cuts in his day with the writing of his day, so we see him shaving, then erasing what is presumably a “non-sequential” detail: that he often cries without knowing why. Throughout the film, he retells the narrative, starting again and again with I wake up. I suspect that this theme of waking up (repeated by Lewis) would annoy disability activists, since there is the hint in there that the disability is like a nightmare: Pratt’s wish – and isn’t this the abled culture’s version of disability – is to wake up from this bad dream of irreparable injury. I wake up, and I am normal again. But it’s the story that he struggles with, the act of story-telling smashed by the injury to his sequencing functions, and it is pulled off cinematically without the formal gadgetry of, say, Memento.

Indeed, The Lookout is a much more sober reflection on the relationship between narrative, film, and the structures of the brain than Memento. And it’s more touching, if I can use such a naive term. In any case, these relationships are not merely a facade added on to the substructure of the crime thriller, but actually drive the events in a variety of interesting ways. I don’t think the marketing did justice to how good a film this is. The catch line in the commercials was Spargo’s insistence that “whoever has the money has the power.” This is almost trite in comparison to the film’s more complex themes. The catch phrase might have been the little heuristic device that Lewis provides to Pratt when they discuss his problems of sequencing: Start at the end and write backwards. This sort of teleological approach has always been the problem of narrative theory, but it provides the film with its curious twist, a twist that doesn’t so much wow you as stick with you after the credits fade. If Memento‘s narrative pyrotechnics left audiences wondering what the real narrative may have been, The Lookout‘s more cautious approach seems to twist narrative itself.

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