Click here for the flashback interview with Bart Layton for AMERICAN ANIMALS.
Sometimes an ending can make or break a film. And so it is with CRIME 101, a thoughtful meditation on what happens when following the rules just doesn’t pay off. The payoff to a narrative that could have used some tightening is not just in keeping with the characters we’ve come to know, it packs the pleasure of watching the right people get what’s coming to them, and the people delivering that package finally understanding what is truly important. Yes, I know, that sounds a preachy, but Bart Layton, he of the, ahem, criminally undervalued AMERICAN ANIMALS, has put together an engrossing film that juxtaposes the growing desperation of good people coming to terms with a system that has let them down with the liberation of realizing that power is theirs for the taking.
The intersecting lives includes Davis (Mark Ruffalo), a cop who believes in solving a case, not catering to department statistics, Sharon (Halle Berry), a high-end insurance broker staring down her expiration date as the sort of eye candy needed to close deals with billionaires, and Miller (Chris Hemsworth), a jewel thief who has channeled his ODC into meticulously detailed capers in which no one gets hurt except the insurance company. The cop is onto Mike’s pattern but can’t get anyone to listen to him, not even his empathetic partner (Corey Hawkins) who has been advised to find a new partner if he wants to rise in the department. He also can’t get an ID on Miller, a man so obsessed with leaving no clues that he buffs himself down before a job so as not to leave any stray skin flakes or hair follicles.
All three are slowly realizing that their life choices are letting them down, be it Sharon’s goal of promotion to partner at the allegorically monikered firm of Laidlaw & Vile, Davis’ wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh slaying in her one scene) who announces her decision to leave him at a diner, or Miller finding out that his mentor in crime (frog-voiced Nick Nolte) has a replacement for him Ormon, (Barry Keoghan), waiting in the wings and will have no qualms about using him. This is why Layton’s film is more than a mere crime drama. It’s an existential crisis made manifest as it considers crime versus ethics with a slow-burn that creates the claustrophobia these characters have always lived within but failed to recognize. Sure, the proceedings start off with a jolt as the wee hours of the morning unfold from a cloying guided meditation that is at once glib and profound, depending on how one listens, to a high-speed chase through pre-dawn Los Angeles. But that chase gives way to a different kind of hunt, that of authenticity, which proves to be a more elusive and more dangerous quarry.
The performances are as on point as the sharp editing that finds the commonalities among these three people. Hemsworth plays to the essential shyness of his character, and a need for connection that leads to a questionable decision when he is in a minor fender-bender with the portentously named Maya (Monica Barbaro). There is a silence to his character is resonant, and instead of being off-putting or one-dimensional, renders him an object of intense curiosity to us. For her part, Berry brings a ferocity clothed in expensive, low-cut blouses and showy gold jewelry that screams success. She has all the confidence, and the smarts, to play a professional game that she soon discovers that she is losing, but when we first meet her, in those dark hours just before sunrise, slathering concealer on her face with dead-eyed determination and dealing with yet another low score on her sleep meter, we are introduced to someone who has subconsciously realized what is happening, but can’t quite let that idea float into her consciousness. Then there’s Davis, a rumpled heap who smokes too much and pees sitting down to gain a few extra minutes of productivity. Ruffalo makes him just as obsessive as the other two, just as driven, but in a sweet-natured package crowned with an enviable mop of curls and an inability to just let go of a case no matter the professional consequences. Flitting among them is Ormon, a creature of pure id and violence. Keoghan has given him cold-eyes that have no soul and made of him a terrifying agent of chaos with blonde-tips.
Layton gives us the time to get to know these people, the way they cope with surprises and setbacks, revealing through body language and exquisitely unfussy dialogue where they think they are in their lives and how they got themselves there. He uses cinematography to telegraph narrative, starting with a night view of the city that slowly rotates into an upright position, grounding us if only momentarily before sending us off on a vision quest.
By the time we get to the climax of CRIME 101, we are so fully invested in these characters, and so blown off-kilter about what is and isn’t real in their lives, that the tension is barely tolerable, playing hope against logic and transmuting into something that is more than the sum of its parts. The elite have been dissected with ruthless precision, not revealing anything we didn’t already know, but so rigorously damning about the definition of what justice means in a world with precious little we are in danger of becoming radicalized. The journey may be just a little longer than it needs to be, but it is worth every centimeter for its intelligent finesse. And bonus point because you will never think of a smoothie in quite the same way.
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