Screenwriter Scott Frank's well-made and smartly written first directorial effort The Lookout is intriguing and much fun to watch despite a weak payoff. Frank has a record of accomplishment as a screenwriter with credits that include The Interpreter, Minority Report, Out of Sight, and Get Shorty. Working for himself this time he's been able to attempt something a little different, exploring character and situation in original ways. As Chris Pratt, a brain-damaged young man from a wealthy background leading a downscale life, Joseph Gordon-Levitt again shows a knack for picking unusual lead roles and performing well in them (compare Manic, Mysterious Skin, and Brick). Frank in his turn reveals an ability, hitherto unknown to us, to make a film of his own that's rich and strange out of some pretty familiar materials -- twenty-something small town losers, a botched heist with double-crosses. Jeff Daniels -- who in maturity has become a superb character actor -- leads a good supporting cast as Gordon-Levitt's shrewd and high-functioning blind roommate, Lew.

Frank is adept at the way he ever-so-slowly injects mayhem into a carefully established world of relative drabness. Gordon-Levitt keeps Chris Pratt real and unconventional -- never just a sad case. He's re-learning how to grasp simple sequences (get up, shower with soap, eat breakfast, go to work), keeping endless little notes just to remember things, but he has spirit and youth and looks and still carries traces of his princely status in school and his patrician family origins. He keeps locking the keys in his car but has no trouble recalling his glorious past as a golden boy and high school hockey star. He has a gimpy walk and can't find a can opener in the kitchen, but he has the spunk to want to find himself a girlfriend and he's seeking to better himself. In a remedial program to retrain his memory, he also works at night as janitor in a small rural bank, but he is pushing successfully to become a teller there. The dynamic between Chris and Lew plays tricks with our stereotypes of handicap. They have complimentary weaknesses and strengths. They may both be looking for love, but more than that they're hoping to accomplish something. Chris has to come to terms not with his handicap, which he seeks to transcend, but with the trauma and guilt of the horrible car accident he caused. Lew wants to start a restaurant with Chris as a partner. Still, there's desperation in both of them. Lew doesn't seem capable of a love life and if Chris leaves him his existence will be lonely. Chris wants his old life back but knows he'll never have it.

A wild card enters this game when an edgy high school classmate named Gary Spargo (Matthew Goode, very effective here) meets Chris in a bar. Gary chats up a girl with the opener, "I thought I was good-looking" and Chris writes it down but when he tries it later, it falls flat because he gets the intonation wrong: "I thought I was good-looking." "Yeah, maybe you were," the girl says. End of Seduction 101.

But Gary fixes Chris up with an ex-pole dancer with the stage name of Luvlee Lemons (Isla Fisher). The meeting in the bar wasn't by chance. Chris's job cleaning the little bank every night is the primary linchpin of the plot: this is why Gary and his little gang lure him into their fold with Luvlee as bait.

The influential Quentin Tarantino notoriously plays wild and free with chronology in Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, and attacks a devolving robbery scene crab-wise -- without even filming the robbery -- in Reservoir Dogs. In contrast Frank's crime caper follows a straightforward chronology but approaches its climax from a peculiar viewpoint -- not of the ring leader but a bit player, Chris, who's seduced and then coerced into being the robbers' lookout because of his access to the bank.

The plot's secondary linchpin is a motto Gary persuades Chris to copy into his little notebook: "Whoever has the money has the power." When Chris decides to adopt this as his personal mantra things turn around: it's the revolt of the underdog. Eventually The Lookout morphs into a story of robbery and betrayal; but like Fabián Bielinsky's terrific character study-cum-crime story The Aura, a lot of Frank's film is devoted to deepening its portraits of individuals, apart from any consideration of crime or action. Toward the end Frank skips a step or two and resolves the mess a little too neatly and quickly. But that doesn't detract from the particularity and wit of what's come before. Scott Frank is a new director to watch.

©2007 Chris Knipp
CineScene