Justin Chang reviews the new crime thriller, in which Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, and Halle Berry manage to make familiar noir archetypes feel believable.
As a happy longtime resident of Pasadena, a city in a landlocked stretch of Los Angeles County, I blanched at this wrongheaded sentiment and tried my best not to hold it against Sharon or the movie. I also stifled a laugh during a scene in which Lou, arguing with his soon-to-be ex-wife , claims that he’s moving to the ocean: “I’m way more beach than you are!” he insists.
Ryan Gosling’s Ken, from “Barbie,” couldn’t have said it better. Happily, though, “Crime 101,” which was written and directed by the English filmmaker Bart Layton, sidesteps more L.A. clichés than it barrels into, even allowing for its mild groaner of a title—a reference to Route 101. Lou is trying to solve a string of robberies committed by a culprit who targets jewelry stores located along the 101, presumably to facilitate a speedy getaway. No one who’s inched their way through traffic between Hollywood and downtown will buy this logic, but no matter. The robber, of course, is Davis, who is something of a pacifist prince of thieves. He abhors violence and endeavors to commit his crimes as humanely as possible, keeping the extractions clean by prepping heavily in advance. A tense opening heist sets the tone and establishes Davis’s M.O.: he intercepts a stash of valuable diamonds as they’re being transported from one location to the next, armed with a gun, a disguise, and, crucially, in-depth knowledge of the transporters’ home addresses, family members, and other personal details. Davis himself has no permanent address or family to speak of, and comes across as void of personal information. On a dinner date with a young woman named Maya , he’s magnetically inscrutable; when she asks what he does for a living, he mumbles something about “software development” and moves on. Hemsworth, in a beautifully controlled performance, plays Davis as a charismatic savant—a tad clenched and awkward in his rare social interactions, yet still capable of friendliness, decency, and charm. Those qualities bind him, in a spiritual sense, to Lou, who can’t suppress a quiet admiration for the criminal he’s pursuing, and also to Sharon, the insurance broker, who is unwittingly drawn into both men’s orbits. She’s investigating a claim filed by Sammy Kassem , a jewelry-store proprietor who was robbed by Davis, and soon she’s sparring verbally with Lou over the specifics of the crime. Later, Sharon and Lou will have a friendlier run-in at a yoga studio—a cautiously deployed SoCal cliché and a rare coincidence in a plot where connections and entanglements are otherwise quite plausibly mapped out. One way to read “Crime 101” is as a savvy, moderately sardonic corrective to Paul Haggis’s “Crash” , in which various Angelenos are forever crossing and recrossing paths in ludicrously contrived fashion, and every fender bender is a cry of rebellion against the loneliness of life behind the wheel. “We crash into each other just to feel something,” someone says in “Crash,” and “Crime 101” comes close to redeeming even that heavy-handed sentiment. An accidental rear-end collision is what brings Davis and Maya together in the first place—and their ensuing relationship, though not without its bumps, sends the story on some of its more pleasurable curves. There are other aesthetic Mann-erisms on display: in the gunmetal gleam of Wilson’s images; in the score, composed by Blanck Mass, which supplies an endless, infectious line of jittery propulsion; and in the car chases, which are unfailingly realistic and, as a consequence, astoundingly forceful. Yet the film’s greatest debts are less stylistic than philosophical: “Crime 101” is, like many a Mann movie, about the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of work. Davis, Lou, and Sharon all turn out to be detectives of a sort, each with a gift for quick-study discernment; they take an unmistakable pride in doing their jobs well and react defiantly when their employers fall short. Sharon, who’s spent years waiting to be made a partner at her firm, is repeatedly sidelined by corporate ageism and sexism. Lou is stymied by the matter-of-fact corruption of the Los Angeles Police Department, to the point of not even being able to trust his partner . And Davis’s integrity puts him at odds with his longtime fence, Money , who responds by enlisting the services of Ormon , a platinum-blond thug on a motorcycle. Keoghan, with his flinty stare and wiry physique, is reliably cast as agents of chaos, and as Ormon he unleashes a level of violence that nearly tears a hole in the picture. You want him to die the moment he appears. Ormon’s rage isn’t just scary; it’s messy, unhinged, an affront to the smooth professionalism and sneaky compassion that Davis, Lou, and Sharon evince. For Keoghan, the role represents both a homecoming and a reversal: he starred in Layton’s previous feature, the docudrama “American Animals” , in which he played an amateur crook of a rather more cautious, morally conflicted temperament. “American Animals” was a painstaking deconstruction of a real-life heist, from 2004, which made room onscreen for the culprits as well as the actors playing them. Before that, Layton directed “The Imposter” , a documentary portrait of a prodigiously gifted con artist. “Crime 101” may be his first entirely fictional feature, but it’s recognizably of a piece with his earlier work, in its fascination with the psychology of thieves, its attention to forensic details, and the exacting deliberation with which it unfolds. At two hours and twenty minutes, the film is as susceptible to sprawl as the city in which it unfolds, though I do wish that its wide-ranging love for Los Angeles—downtown, Echo Park, Hollywood, Historic Filipinotown, and Santa Monica are all on the long list of shooting locations—had translated to an equivalent curiosity about the city’s various siloed demographics. Maadi, the superb Iranian American actor who came to international prominence in Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation” , establishes his character as a compelling presence in a few bristling early scenes—and then vanishes from the picture far too soon. There’s a tension, too, between the observant realism of Layton’s style and the derivativeness of the plotting, though the three leads, all superb, smooth it over with considerable skill. You believe Hemsworth, Ruffalo, and Berry, even if you never quite lose sight of the world-weary archetypes they represent: the emotionally anesthetized crook, the rumpled detective, the industry veteran at the end of her tether. It was refreshing to emerge from “Crime 101” and only then remember that Ruffalo and Hemsworth, still best known to most of the moviegoing world as Hulk and Thor, have shared several bloated C.G.I. extravaganzas’ worth of screen time. In this way, Layton’s imperfect but enveloping L.A. noir offers an escape from what Hollywood typically considers escapism. The actors, no less than the characters they play, can take pride in a job well done. ♦
Noir Los Angeles Chris Hemsworth Mark Ruffalo Halle Berry
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