I'm going to do capsule writeups of whatever I can and plow through my backlog tonight at the hotel. This is absurdly late by my standards, but here goes.
Screenwriter Scott Frank's directorial debut opened the 2007 South by Southwest Film Festival with a bang, literally and figuratively. Featuring moments that made me jump out of my seat and others that made me rest my hands on my palms and steady my gaze, this is a movie that really keeps you with it the whole way through. Joseph Gordon-Levitt isn't just a face on the poster, he really headlines this movie and shows impressive levels of nuance that tons of actors of any age (not just others in their mid-twenties) should be jealous of, and that's no understatement.
The Lookout follows Chris Pratt (Levitt), a young man who used to be the "big man on campus", but following a car accident, is left a shadow of his former self, socially awkward and unable to properly sequence his daily life. He lives with Jeff Daniels, a wisecracking blind man who is much more than that simple description can communicate.
Chris works as a janitor at a bank and falls in with some shady people led by Matthew Goode, last seen by many as the uppercrust brother of Emily Mortimer in Match Point. Goode plays a dark, hard-edged guy in this film, and gets past thug stereotypes to present a bad guy who has given himself over to the wrong side of the tracks. Isla Fisher shows up as a young woman who admired Chris during his glory days as a varsity hockey player and runs in the wrong circles, though she may or may not be aware of that fact.
The Lookout is a heist movie, but unlike a number of the ones we've seen in the last decade, moves along at a steady clip and drops in its big bangs right where you aren't set to expect them.
Levitt's performance is one of my favorites of the festival, showing no shred of pretentious mugging or desire to crowd out the actors or scene that surrounds him. Levitt turns in a distinctly "un-Hollywood" performance that truly shows us a young man who thought he was mighty, but has fallen a long way...so far that he may never recover unless he can summon the necessary resolve from within to make his life better. He gives us this broken person (who he must see in various incarnations in the industry around him) with such authenticity that it would be a shame to miss this very well-made film if only for his performance.
Beyond the ever-sharpening (makes him sound more deadly) Levitt, lots of people are going to be talking about Jeff Daniels' companion/live-in roommate character stealing the show, and he does in a lot of places. You're probably going to see some morons out there going on about "Funnyman Jeff Daniels sends me rolling again", and though he cracks the jokes and makes you want to shoot the shit with a "cool guy" like him, he does some really delicate, tender work here that acts as a great reminder of just how fucking good he is at what he does.
Regardless of what you know Jeff Daniels from, whether it's that Farrelly Brothers movie everybody saw, or Fifth of July, or some other humbling, powerful piece he did in the theatre, you've gotta respect what he does here and the fact he chose to do this flick, and he chose it for a reason. The script is solid, the people are good at what they do, and barely anyone even tries to do what Sydney Pollack has said you have to do: "make good movies".
I like very much when screenwriters "go hyphenate" and direct (as in this case), because you get meaty, fleshed-out characters and in Frank's case here, a great example of how to really make a movie that surprises people.
It would be a shame for you to miss one of the smartest films of 2007 thus far by any stretch, especially because of the forgettable, disposable, not-worth-recycling pieces of shit coming out the same day as The Lookout.