(2006) "Start at the end," the sightless Lewis (Jeff Daniels) advises his housemate Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). "Can't tell a story unless you know where it's going." On their prom night with Chris at the wheel driving through the farmland outside Kansas City, his girlfriend Kelly in the front seat of a convertible and in the back standing up, Nina and Danny, he turns off the headlines so that they can see the swarms of fireflies overhead just before the car crashes into a stalled combine.

Suffering from disinhibition, sequencing difficulties, and memory lapses, Chris, attends classes at the Life Skills Center in KC, works nights as a janitor at the Noel State Bank and Trust, and lives with the much older Lewis, who's employed in a call center taking orders for a florist. Their partnership was arranged by the Center: Lewis helps Chris with instructions and tough-love encouragement.

Frustrated by his forgetfulness (locking his keys in the car with a spare inside his shoe) and reliance on a notebook, the bank manager's reneging on a promise to give him a chance as a teller, his dependence on his wealthy father (who pays his rent), his loss of coordination (can't skate), and the knowledge that he killed two friends and crippled his former girlfriend, he's vulnerable when Gary Spargo (Matthew Goode) initiates an acquaintance in a bar (Chris drinks non-alcoholic beer), saying he'd graduated a few years ahead with Chris's sister Alison but remembered with admiration "Slapshot" Pratt on the hockey team.

Gary hooks Chris up with former pole dancer Luvlee Lemons (Isla Fisher), who favors him with her affections and seems to actually like him. The week after Thanksgiving Chris joins Luvlee, Gary, and others for dinner at a farm house where Gary reveals his plan to rob the bank with Chris on the inside as the lookout. "Right or wrong," Gary the one-time convict says, after life's been ripped away leaving you dependent on others, "I'm gonna help you. … Whoever has the money has the power."

Elsewhere Lewis has a plan to open a restaurant, Lew's Your Lunch, with Chris, but obtaining a loan to get started has been elusive for the blind man and his frontal-lobe-injury partner. Lewis asks Luvlee one night while she's spending the night with Chris: "What are you doing here?"

Chris decides to go for the money with Gary, Bone, and Cork, taking pictures of the bank's vault. Just before the heist, he becomes anxious and angry with Lewis, announcing he'll soon be moving out on his own, and with Ted, a police deputy who stops in each night at the bank to check on Chris and share doughnuts. Coincidentally just before closing, Mr Tuttle, the bank manager, tells Chris that he's decided to give him an opportunity to prove himself as a teller, causing Chris to have doubts about taking part in the criminal enterprise. But it's too late to back out.

There are several surprises: e.g. "Deputy Doughnut," as Gary refers to Ted, whose wife is expecting their first child any day, proves to be much more of a professional law-enforcement officer than might have been expected. In the latter portion of the film, Chris has two chances to go to the police instead of acting on his own, including being stopped by a patrolman; but instead (just like when someone irrationally goes into a dark house alone in a scary movie) he takes matters into his own hands, even though doing so puts him and Lewis in greater danger. Of course, had he made the reasonable choice, the movie wouldn't have had its dramatic climax.

Since neither Chris's older sister Alison (who supposedly had a date with Gary) nor Lewis has any clue as to who Gary (who'd spent time behind bars) is, I question his story about having graduated a few years ahead of Chris as reliable. If not, where did he get all of the information (especially about "Slapshot" Pratt) about Chris?

Then again, maybe Gary really did know and admire (or envy) Chris in high school and wanted as part of his motivation in using him to do the rich kid and his family wrong, a disadvantaged punk getting back at the Pratts for Alison's having turned him down after a date.

Luvlee tells Chris she remembers watching him play hockey when he was in high school. Did Gary feed her that or had she admired him from afar? Perhaps her tenderness toward him arises anew from a crush she once had on him in more innocent times. I was disappointed that the mysterious Luvlee disappears before revealing more of her motivation of being with Gary and feelings for Chris. Nevertheless, this latter interpretation adds a deeper current, an undertow, to the story. In this, screenwriter Scott Frank's directorial debut, the end justifies the means.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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