Lookout: Director's first film is a dark caper that really clicks

By Philip Martin

Photo by Movie Studio Release

Lewis (Jeff Daniels, left) and Chris (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) support each other in The Lookout.

ADVERSTISMENT

LITTLE ROCK — It's always interesting when a writer seeks to move up the Hollywood food chain, for directing a movie requires a completely different skill set from the one that writing a screenplay does. Most writers - at least when they are writing - are introverts building ships in their heads. Directors are more like generals; they must be very good at giving orders. Andto be good at giving orders they must have some source of authority - whether it be charisma or a closet full of Oscars.

Scott Frank has been one of Hollywood's best-known and most sought-after screenwriters for years - he wrote Minority Report and adapted Out of Sight and Get Shorty, a pair of films based on Elmore Leonard novels. So maybe it's no surprise that The Lookout, Frank's directorialdebut - and the first original screenplay he has undertaken since Little Man Tate and Dead Again in 1991 - feels a lot like an adaptation of a Leonard crime novel. A black Leonardesque wit runs through it. The dialogue is wry and the characters are patched-up damaged types hoping life will provide them a second chance, if not a second act.

Movie

The Lookout

Rating: R

Length: 1 hour, 38 minutes

More information

Frank has the good sense and Hollywood wherewithal to secure Joseph Gordon-Levitt, perhaps the most promising actor of his generation, as his lead. Gordon-Levitt (Mysterious Skin, Brick) plays Chris Pratt, a former Kansas high school hockey star who killed two of his friends and nearly himself in a stupid prom night car wreck. Crippled by guilt and a head injury that circumscribes his future, Chris works as a night janitor in a small-town bank (he aspires to a teller's job) and shares a dingy apartment with a self-sufficient blind man named Lewis (Jeff Daniels), who harbors the modest ambition of one day opening a lunch counter.

While Chris is from a wealthy family, he has chosen to make his own way out because of complicated emotional mingling of pridefulness and shame. Since his injury he has trouble focusing, sequencing events and controlling impulses. He's given to blurting out rude remarks, to locking his keys in his car, to failing miserably at what seem like straightforward tasks like warming up a can of chili.

He's also often reminded of his glory days. One night in a bar he's approached by high schoolacquaintance Gary (Matthew Goode). Though Gary was a couple of years ahead of Chris in high school, he looked up to the star athlete, he admired the way he handled himself, the way he talked to girls - the way the world seemed ready to unfold at his feet.

But now? Sometimes life doesn't work out like we planned.

Chris likes Gary, and afterGary introduces him to sexually confident Luvlee (Isla Fisher), the bonds of friendship are cemented. Now Gary wants Chris to do a little favor for him.

The Lookout isn't perfect - the Luvlee character seems too fresh-faced and sweet, too much the jock's girl-next-door fantasy, and the ending wraps things up too neatly - but it is one where nearly every scene stands on its own, with complex, believablecharacters who talk like real people (only a little smarter and funnier). And there isn't a false performance in the bunch.

Goode, who hardly registered in Match Point, displays a Mephistophelian charm as intelligent, dangerous Gary, and Daniels resists the temptation to take his Lewis over the top. And let's allow that our perception of Fisher's Luvlee might be filtered through Chris' wishfulimagination - there's nothing wrong with her acting, just her wardrobe and makeup.

Gordon-Levitt is superb as the damaged boy. It's an acutely observed and genuine-feeling performance, free of the usual tics and winces actors supply when called on to play the thwarted and lame. Chris' larger problem has less to do with what he can't do anymore than what he once did.

MovieStyle, Pages 41, 44 on 03/30/2007