About The Lookout
What follows (at Portico)Â is a lightly edited (and corrected) letter to a correspondent and friend who recommended that I rent and watch The Lookout, a picture that I don’t even recall seeing advertized. Written and directed by Scott Frank, it stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Matthew Goode, Isla Fisher, and Jeff Daniels. Very roughly, it’s about the difficulties that Mr Gordon-Levitt’s character has in reconstructing his life after sustaining a head injury in an automobile crash for which he was irresponsibly responsible, Two of his friends were killed, another also severely wounded. The “problem” aspects of the plot, predictably, yield a certain “made for TV” quality that is not entirely overcome until the second half of the film.
We watched the movie on Saturday night. The first thing that I wanted to do on Sunday morning was to write a report to my friend, telling her no less about the circumstances in which I saw the video than about the kind of critical response that might show up in one of my “Friday Movies” pieces. I see the movies covered in “Friday movies” in theatres, and if nothing else my letter backs up my insistence that I can respond to a film far more intensely on the small screen at home than on the big screen in public. I don’t seem to meld with audiences in the dark; the everyday detachment that gets me from my flat to the movie house follows me into the auditorium. At home, I am far more defenselessly at the mercy of what I’m watching.
The following rough synopsis ought to make my letter at least fairly comprehensible: a creep called Gary Spargo (Mr Goode) uses his girlfriend, Luvlee (Ms Fisher), as an enticement to engage Chris (Mr Gordon-Levitt) as a lookout in a robbery that Gary has planned for a bank where Chris works as a night janitor (despite his upper-middle class background), and where Mr Tuttle is the manager who won’t give Chris a chance to step up to teller. That Gary’s plans will miscarry is never in the slightest doubt, especially once we get to know a cop (Sergio di Zio) who likes to stop by the bank every night to share a box of doughnuts with Chris. Viewers familiar with Woody Allen’s Match Point may have no trouble recognizing Mr Goode’s face, but nothing else about him will be remotely familiar. Bone, Gary’s shooter, is played by a nasty-looking Greg Dunham. Jeff Daniels plays Lewis, a blind man with whom the local social workers have hooked Chris up with as a flatmate.
