The Lookout (2007)

In trying to recreate a sensibility from a bygone era, modern-day film noirs can seem as stiff and artificial as Botox treatment, but not The Lookout. Veteran screenwriter Scott Frank, making an impressive directorial debut here, adheres to the tenets of the genre without it feeling like a hermetically sealed tribute. The psychologically hobbled hero, the pervasive moral ambivalence, the femme fatale, etc. — all fall into place in this taut thriller.

True to the noir aesthetic, the movie’s hero is damaged goods — literally. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Chris Pratt (no, not that Chris Pratt), a popular high school jock whose fortunes change one ill-fated night in which he is responsible for a car crash that kills two friends and cripples his girlfriend.

A resulting head injury has rendered Chris a different person. He cannot remember things in sequence. He has inexplicable crying jags. He possesses no filter to keep from saying things better left unsaid, particularly around women. Perhaps most frustrating is a defective memory that forces Chris to record everything in a notebook he keeps with him at all times.

Haunted by his past and besieged by his present, Chris is tailor-made for the ambivalence of noir. In this instance, that world is the fictitious town of Noel, Kan. It’s a hollow existence for our protagonist. He mops the floors of a small bank and rooms with a sharp-witted blind man named Lewis (the always dependable Jeff Daniels) whom he met at a rehab center. Chris cannot make it through his daily routine without checking his notebook, and yet he chafes against the limitations of his condition.

The past still exerts a powerful hold, the glory days when Chris was the big man on campus, a fearsome (and perhaps cruel) champion hockey player. He can’t square those memories with the young man for whom opening a can of tomatoes is now a struggle.

To put it another way, he is a prime target to be duped. Enter Gary Spargo (Matthew Goode), a charismatic, smooth-talking thug who meets Chris at a bar one night. Gary is bad news through and through, but he stokes Chris’ lingering feelings of entitlement. It also doesn’t hurt that Gary introduces Chris to a sexy ex-stripper with the stage name Luvlee Lemons (Isla Fisher in sex kitten mode). 

Like many a great noir, the audience is several steps ahead of Chris, and we know what he is too slow to see. Gary eventually makes it clear after a drug-addled Thanksgiving dinner: he and his pals plan to rob the bank where Chris works, but they need someone on the inside.

Frank’s script for The Lookout famously kicked around Hollywood for years until the author, whose credits included Out of Sight and Minority Report), decided to just direct the damned thing himself. The movie gods were pleased. His directorial debut nearly matches his masterful writing, creating beautifully realized characters from what easily could have been archetypes.

The writing inspires knockout performances from a first-rate cast. Daniels has a great time with his role as the acid-tongued Lewis, and Goode is nearly unrecognizable from his fey turn in 2005’s Match Point. The guy is a chameleon. But the standout is Gordon-Levitt. He conveys startling depth, giving Chris complexity and nuance.

In the end, the biggest star turn is by Frank himself. The Lookout bears traces of other movies, especially Memento and the criminally overlooked Kansas noir of Harold Ramis‘ The Ice Harvest, but Frank manages the neat trick of exemplifying film noir without feeling particularly derivative.

Best of all, there is no extraneous material. The Lookout doles out the information we need in a meticulously constructed narrative. And he clearly has a blast riffing on the nature of storytelling itself. When the brain-damaged Chris tries to improve his ability to sequence, Lewis helpfully urges him to think of his life as a story akin to Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

And like that old chestnut, The Lookout proves to be, well, just right.