I’m not certain I would have ever drawn a comparison between these two movies if the DVDs had not shown up in my mailbox on the same day, but thanks to Netflix I found some distinct parallels and a great lesson in how complex characters make for an engaging plot.

Both movies begin with horrific life-altering car crashes. In Disturbia, director D.J. Caruso presents us with the more graphic version with not one, but two in-your-face impacts. We’ve seen this shot before, most recently in a Volkswagen commercial. It’s always shocking. After the involuntary recoil, my thoughts turn to those in the audience who may have lived through a similar crash and are blindsided by this visceral reminder. Oh well, that’s entertainment. But does it serve the story? In this case, the story demands an event that causes our hero to turn despondent and violent enough to punch a teacher in the face, but only bad enough to be sentenced to three months of house arrest. We rejoin Kale (Shia LaBeouf) one year after the crash. His wounds have healed, but it seems that the experience has turned him into some kind of slacker jerk, basically, a regular teenager, angry because he wants to hang out with his friends and plays video games, but can’t because he is supposed to be “doing time”. Of course, he may have been just like this before the accident and we wouldn’t know because very little backstory is revealed about any of these characters. Of course, backstory is not what we want from Disturbia; it is what it is. A movie about spying on your neighbors should be scary and a bit of fun, and this one has its moments. By the end, Kale’s suspicions have been proven correct, he saves his mother from the killer neighbor, and he gets the girl. Trouble is, I don’t care. I didn’t realize just how much I didn’t care until I watched The Lookout and was reminded just how it should be done.

Scott Frank knows how to make us care about characters. This has made him one of Hollywood’s “go-to guys” and one of my favorite screenwriters. In the Lookout he gives us Chris (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), one-time golden-boy of his high school, who suffered a moderate head injury and saw his future slip away along with his short-term memory and ability to keep things straight in his head. He is broken and in a desperate struggle to “get his old life back.” The crash is largely left to our imagination. We know its coming becasue Chris is driving a carload of teens down a country road with the lights off. That kind of scene never ends well. We cut away just as he turns the lights on to see a piece of farm equipment blocking the road. We don’t get a good look at the carnage. Instead, we are haunted by it throughout the story, just like Chris, who has blocked it from his memory.

As a writer, Scott Frank knows that we empathize with flawed characters, and flaw create a struggle, and struggle creates conflict, and from conflict comes drama, and of course this makes for an engaging plot. All of this is contained in The Lookout, and I look forward to studying it scene by scene.

What makes this movie worth watching, however, is that as a director, Scott Frank gives his actors room to bring the characters to life with honesty and depth, especially Joseph Gordon Leavitt, who continues to seek out dark and challenging roles. This is a great lesson coming from a man who is paid large sums of money to come in a rescue with words. The truth is, the words are only there to make us care about something, and it is a collaboration between the writer, director and actors (not to mention the DP, editor, and everyone else involved) that brings it all to life.

My point is that it is very rare for all of these forces to come together and create something worth caring about, and I believe Frank has gotten it right here. The movie ends with a bit of a mixed victory for our hero, Chris. He survives, avoids facing any charges, but he still struggles, still dreams of getting his life back. I guess this makes it a “difficult” movie for some, but it is also what makes Chris a memorable character.

DISTURBIA
directed by D.J. Caruso
written by

THE LOOKOUT
written and directed by Scott Frank

Ted Crawford (Anthony Hopkins), a mad-genius structural engineer, devises a plot to do away with his cheating wife and walk away a free man. Unfortunately, the weak spot in his plan, from which the movie takes its name, is also the flaw which brings down the script.

Willie Beechum (Ryan Gosling), a city prosecutor who has attracted the attention of a powerful corporate law firm, sleepwalks trough his final case and is blindsided by the devilishly shrewd Crawford. What appears to be a simple open-and-shut case gets complicated when Crawford reveals that the arresting detective was sleeping with his wife, and the gun assumed to be the weapon used on her has never been fired.

Now, what we know, if we were paying close attention, is that when the detective arrives on the scene to confront the gun wielding Crawford, a big show is made of the men agreeing to place their very similar weapons down so they can talk. When the discovery is made later that the gun found on the scene had not been used, nor has another turned up, clearly a switch was made and the detective walked out the door with it. Why would he not simply smell the gun and realize what had happened? Probably for the same reason that he did not tell Beechum, the prosecuting attorney, that he was involved with the victim: because the movie would be over right then and there.

The specter hanging over act two is the missing murder weapon. We know where it is, the only question for us is, when was the first switch made so the detective would end up with his own gun. Since we don’t really know any backstory, who really cares. It could have happened anytime. The most obvious choice, and this is confirmed later in flashback, is when Crawford entered the couple’s hotel room on the day of the murder. Of course this doesn’t explain how Crawford happened to have the exact model gun, and how long he had been planning this since if the purchase were very recent it would seem to be evidence in and of itself.

Without a weapon as evidence, Crawford is acquitted of attempted murder. On the way out of the court room, the detective shoots himself in the head with what we know to be the murder weapon. This is more than just a bit of ironic twisting, as we shall see. Crawford, now a free man, visits his wife, who has been in a deep coma since the shooting. As act two comes to an end, he decides to pull the plug on her and she dies.

Beechum has now ruined his chances with the corporate firm and only retains his job with the city because the DA respects his new found integrity. Obsessed with putting this bad guy away, Beechum finds the weak spot in Crawford’s plan, and moves in to exploit it. Now the pieces fall into place: bullet in the detective’s head matches bullet from wife’s head, which could not be removed while she was still alive, so by pulling the plug Crawford exposed his crime. But, he surmises, this doesn’t matter because he has already been tried and acquitted. Not so, says Beechum, “you were tried for attempted murder. This is murder. New charge. New trial.”

Now it all makes sense, and I can’t say that I saw all of it coming. I will say that I think the main thing holding this thriller together are the top notch performances by the two leads, but I can’t help but wonder what Hitchcock might have done differently.

FRACTURE
directed by Gregory Hoblit
written by Daniel Payne and Glenn Gers

The first ten minutes of this movie are breathtaking. The premise has to do with an ATF agent investing a terrorist bombing, so as we watch sailors and families boarding a New Orleans ferry in slow motion, we know what’s coming. The explosion is like nothing we have seen before as we watch the fiery carnage from underwater. Agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) appears on the scene and shows that he is the kind of investigator that looks for and finds clues where others don’t think to look.

This is the point where director Tony Scott begins to leave a trail of clues intended to lead us to the big “you got me” moment at the climax. The problem is that most of these clues are a big turn off for at least this viewer. Agent Carlin inspects the body of Clair Kuchever (Paula Patton) in the city morgue by tasting her forehead and making note of what a beautiful corpse she is. Her corpse is rather attractive, a glint in her eye, and barely a sign of the fire which supposedly consumed her. It seems clear that someone along the way decided that the audience wouldn’t stand to be introduced to the love interest by seeing her gruesome corpse, but I’m not sure this is any less disturbing.

Act two is dedicated to explaining of the rules of a domestic surveillance technology which allows the government complete access to view and record events exactly four days in the past. The premise is that the bomber may be planning another attack so viewing the past may provide a clue to help them apprehend a suspect. Agent Carlin seemed to be doing just fine with old fashioned police work. At first, he is skeptical of this new program, and asks all the questions we are asking as we watch. But then he catches a glimpse of Clair Kuchever, and all of his instincts go out the window. His obsession now becomes saving Clair by going into the past and warning her that she is in trouble, which he does. I am sorry to ruin it for you, but you already saw this coming as if you had seen it all before somewhere!

There is a bit of fun to be had here as we see that his intrusion into the past is setting up everything we have already seen in the present, and if we miss any of it, there are some quick flashbacks, or flashforwards as the case may be, to jog our memory. We are heading for what seems to be an interesting exploration of the theme: you can’t change the past.

We are not going to get an ending that makes us think here, though. We are going to get, what someone along the way decided, would be a crowd pleaser. Agent Carlin saves the girl, and saves the ferry passengers, but loses his own life. But, by changing the past and creating a new reality, his present self still exists, and just as we met him at the start of the movie, he arrives on the scene to investigate, only this time, he meets Clair as a living person instead of having to taste her corpse.

DEJA VU
directed by Tony Scott
written by Bill Marsilii & Terry Rossio

“T.I.A.” is the mantra repeated by Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), a smuggler trading between an international diamond cartel and machine-gun wielding rebel forces, when things seem really out of control, and in Ed Zwick’s new movie, BLOOD DIAMOND, set in Sierra Leone during a 1999 civil war, this is quite often. The initials stand for “This is Africa”. I’ve heard this phrase myself, it is said quite often, at least by whites in Africa, in much the same way G.I.s referred to everything in Army as SNAFU during W.W.II, or more recently in the Middle East as things have become FUBAR (if you don’t know what these mean, ask someone in the military.) In my case, as a tourist looking for a specific piece of camping gear or a timely repair of a broken down vehicle, the meaning was probably closer to “This is Not America”, everything you wish for is not sitting on a shelf waiting for you. Goods and services become available, not at their own pace, but at a rate dictated by some outside force, as the moon determines the tides. Colonialism may have ended in Africa, but only in name. Corporations now pull the strings of the corrupt officials in newly “independent” countries. This is the meaning behind Danny Archer’s use of the phrase. Africa has a long history of plunder and bloodshed. Being in the midst of it, one is either corrupted or buried by it. The best one can do is grab a piece while they can, and get out.

Solomon Vandy (Dijmon Hounsou) has a very different view. Africa is his home. He is a simple fisherman trying to make a better life for his family and dreaming of a time of peace when they can flourish in what he sees as a paradise. Rebel forces shatter his dream when they attack his village, spreading terror and collecting slaves to work in the diamond fields. Apart from this rather enormous bit of misfortune, Solomon may be the luckiest man in all of Africa. First, he stumbles across a gigantic pink diamond and secures it from the rebel and government forces under six inches of loose soil. Later, he manages to bump into his family at the gates of a refugee camp housing one million people where he learns that rebels have taken his son and turned him into a brainwashed killer. Fortunately, Solomon crosses paths with his son in the bush, not once, but three times, the last being in the very spot where the diamond has sat undiscovered despite a rebel chief digging up every inch of the clearing except for the one concealing the “big pink”. None of this coincidence can be blamed on Solomon, however, and he remains the heart of the story, never giving up his desire to reunite his family and get his life back.

The third piece of this puzzle is Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), a print journalist desperately trying to break this story wide open and write something that will actually make the rest of the world stand up and take notice. She also hopes to find a man that will accept her for all of her flaws, and, although she correctly pegs him as a scoundrel after their initial meeting, she eventually sees Danny Archer in a moment of weakness as he tears up recounting the death of his parents and decides that this might be the bloke that would truly understand her. Perhaps she attaches herself to every man she runs into, in fact she admits to being draw to crisis, but this relationship seems to be beside the point and slows the rest of the story even if it is totally in character for each of them.

Individually, the characters are each complex and well fleshed out. Their goals are very specific and craftily intertwined in a way that they need one another to achieve what they want. What the story lacks is some doubt in the outcome. Danny Archer is a smuggler with a heart of gold. As soon as he flashes it, we know that Danny’s notebook filled with names and numbered bank account will end up safely in Maddy’s hands, just as we know that despite a few tussles in the bush, Danny will do everything in his power to fulfill his promise to Solomon and not leaving him standing alone on the mountain top. This makes Archer a likable character, but it also makes for a long movie. Zwick’s movie may have been better served with a bit more of the twists and back stabbing employed in John Huston’ s TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE.

In the end, we learn that in 2003 efforts were made to stem the flow of conflict diamonds, but it is up to consumers to insists on conflict-free jewels. This movie has a very strong message, which should continue to resonate even though Sierra Leone has found peace, and legislation has passed to stem the flow of “blood” diamond. The fact that the diamond industry spent millions of dollars in their own p.r. campaign to counter the effects of this movie stands as a statement of proof to the ugliness it portrays and quite possible worse offenses yet to see the light of day. The truth is, This is Still Africa. The conflicts shift to new regions, different corporation rape the land for different resources, as more children are drafted into the fight, more limbs are chopped off, more families are torn apart, and more bodies pile up. As Maddy Bowen struggles to frame the horrors she has witnessed she says, “All anybody sees here are victims. Not people. With faces. And lives. They deserve a voice.” I hope the message here has not overpowered that voice.

BLOOD DIAMOND
written by Charles Leavitt
directed by Ed Zwick