![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Most mornings I'm about as worthless as a park bench in hell
Small Town Crime (2017) is exactly the kind of weird and worthwhile B-picture I love discovering from the '30's and '40's, only this one came out last year. Written and directed by brothers Eshom and Ian Nelms and set in a dry bright California town halfway between some mountains and nowhere, it's a wry, low-budget, high-pulp neo-noir showcase for John Hawkes, whom I have loved ever since Deadwood (2004–06) and who was made for this twisty genre if anyone born after 1950 ever was.
I understand the exigencies of marketing, but every single poster I've seen for this movie makes the protagonist look significantly more badass than he is. You could call Mike Kendall (Hawkes) wiry if you were given to overstatement: he is a skinny sonofabitch in about the condition you'd expect from a man who drinks three meals a day with a lot of liquid grazing in between; his morning routine includes weightlifting in his garage, but since his idea of a sports drink is at least 4.9% ABV, it also inevitably includes throwing up. The most habitual expression on his creased and catlike face is a kind of wary wince, which combined with his spiky hair and his stumblebum unflappability lends him an involuntarily comic air, Buster Keaton with a wicked hangover. In drainpipe T-shirts and a black army jacket, he looks like an aging punk; in his best and most professional suit—which isn't very much of either of these things, not least because he keeps getting thrown out of bars in it—he tends to look like he just woke up at his own wake. He's a wreck, but a charming one, even if his smart mouth sinks job interviews faster than his unemployment checks can come in. Seventeen months ago he was a cop.
The title at this stage might be metaphorical or might be a callback to events we see framed in red-and-blue stutters of emergency light: the tragedy that prompted Mike's expulsion from the force was stupid and spectacular and he's luckier than he deserves that he isn't in jail. He lives in hope of getting his job back, but the deep-down knowledge that he kissed that hope goodbye the night his drunken gunslinging turned a bad scene into a shitshow may be part of what keeps him cracking open cold ones and chasing his AA meetings with bar crawls. For a while the plot ambles around town, following Mike on his nowhere-fast rounds. His sister (Octavia Spencer, also the film's executive producer) loves him, but the months of paying his mortgage are taking a predictable toll; her amiable husband (Anthony Anderson) is hitting his upper limit of dive bars. Even Mike's former colleagues (Michael Vartan and Daniel Sunjata) are losing patience with his cheery wheedling, particularly when he can't be bothered to sober up for it. Then one morning he wakes up in a field, flat on his back in a halo of trash. That's par for the course these days, but after he's peeled himself off the dirt and poured himself back into his car—a souped-up, aerosol-black Chevy Nova whose dashboard is where beer cans go to die; we first meet it parked halfway through a fence—the body he spots by the roadside is not, especially since the bloodied, unconscious young woman it belongs to is still breathing. Quick as an EMT, Mike loads her into the passenger seat and fishtails off to the nearest ER, but by the time he returns the next day with a potted plant and the bedazzled smartphone a carwash attendant found while mopping up the blood, his dark-haired, fur-wearing Jane Doe has died. He's stunned, as foolishly and swampingly devastated as if a baby bird had expired in his hands. His efforts to edge his way into the official investigation are not unkindly but non-negotiably rebuffed: "There is no 'we.' I know you found her, but you're not in this. In any way." There might not even be that much to investigate, just another runaway from a good home who fell into drugs and sex work and was beaten to death by a pimp or a john. But Mike feels responsible for her, not to mention generally useless, and he wants to do one thing right. So he does the only reasonable thing under the circumstances: put on his horrible suit, print up some fake business cards, and introduce himself to the girl's family as "Jack Winter," a private investigator who's willing to take the case for free.
So far, so demi-Chandler. Of course the killing of Kristy Nevil (Stefania Barr) is part of something bigger; of course our half-cocked hero is in over his head; of course his swinging wild at justice is going to endanger his family, scuffing back the carpet on a down-home-and-dirty underworld of hooking and blackmail, high school heroes and well-heeled businessmen and hitmen stonier than Mike on his scrappiest, most junkyard-dog day could hope to be. The basic blocks of this story are unchanged since the days of Black Mask magazine. But Hawkes never feels like he's imitating or parodying anyone, hanging out in the life of this sympathetic, a bit scuzzy, self-inflicted loser, and the world he inhabits shares his refreshing taste for slightly quirked reality over xeroxed pastiche. The titular small town may be nameless and fictional—the film was shot in Utah, although the California plates, mention of the St. John's River, and a remarkable shout-out to the valley quail set the action a few states over—but it feels neither dramatically overcooked nor genre-anonymous. The watering holes are properly skeevy and the sex trade is thriving, but the local economy is more straitened blue collar than Basin City. The big sky and the scattered suburban spaces give a high-country intimacy to the unwrapping plot; it's both looser and more believable that all the relevant people would know one another than if the same events were playing out in San Francisco, L.A., or even Salt Lake City. Most importantly, just because the Nelmses know about a trope doesn't mean they feel bound to observe it. Mike's not terrible at gumshoeing, but neither is he the maverick who's going to beat the flatfoots at their own game. Detectives Crawford and Whitman don't let him in on their leads not because they're bad people or even bad cops, but because he's a loose cannon and a mild-mannered liar and, oh, right, not actually police. There's something absurd and sad and dodgy in his self-reinvention as a DIY Sam Spade, but at the same time there's no more classically quixotic move. Eventually we meet the murdered girl's pimp (Clifton Collins Jr.), a gold-grilled lowrider who goes by the moniker of "Mood": with his heavily modded argon-purple Impala, his soundtrack of classic R&B, and declamatory lines like "Can't you see I'm conversating with this motherfucker?" he's performing the life as much as Mike is playing Jack Winter, P.I. and it tells us some of the same slantwise truth. The script doesn't romanticize him, but there's a sharp moment when he asks Kristy's wealthy, vengeance-minded grandfather (Robert Forster) to think about how she ended up on the street where Mood found her "rolling tricks for dime bags . . . You want to get all mystical and start searching for answers and shit, maybe you ought to think about what y'all did." It is perhaps a stretch that the grandfather should turn out to be handy with a high-powered rifle, but I have the impression a lot of Forster's characters are like that. Even the out-of-town hitmen (Jeremy Ratchford and James Lafferty) who serve the pure narrative purpose of threatening the characters we like have a couple of distinguishing eccentricities of their own, although mostly they have a lot of guns.
The script's one regrettably unexamined inheritance from its hardboiled forebears is its tendency to measure men's heroism or failure against a backdrop of women's bodies. It's not fridge central, but the town's eligible young women can't all be turning tricks out of sketchy bars. Of the non-young women, only Spencer's Kelly and the gravelly bartender played by Dale Dickey really get moments to shine, with honorable mention going to the waitressing ex-girlfriend (Michelle Lang) who not unjustifiably reminds Mike that "sometimes you're just such a shitheel, you know?" On the other hand, the film takes care with the lives of all of its non-white characters, which in a narrative about the possible redemption of a failbucket white dude turns out to matter to me. The overall handling of race is casual but not oblivious. Most of Mike's ex-colleagues are white. The friend group we glimpse at a birthday party for one of Kelly and Teddy's kids is mixed but majority Black. When asked what it was like being fostered into a Black family, Mike who has clearly been answering this question for most of his life deadpans, "Compared to starving and getting the shit beaten out of me by a couple of junkies, I thought it was pretty great."
I saw this movie on the last night of a week's run at the Apple Cinemas in Fresh Pond; I thought I was going to be the only person in the audience until two guys turned up during the opening credits and I'm not sure if one of them stayed till the end. As far as I can tell it played festivals last year and got a very limited theatrical release this month, but it appears to be available to stream online and I plan to buy the DVD on general grounds of signaling to the filmmakers that they should do more of this sort of thing, preferably with Hawkes and Spencer. It's a nice-looking movie, photographed by Johnny Derango with lots of natural light and a good eye for the surrounding geography; greens and reds in the night scenes make a nice change from the action-ubiquitous orange and blue. The climactic shootout in a railyard is never confusing for all its rolling stock and sodium light. I don't have much to say about the score by Chris Westlake, but I really appreciate that Mike's leitmotiv is "Good Times" by Eric Burdon & The Animals. Really what I resent about Small Town Crime is that it's not a novel, because if it were the first in a series I'd cheerfully read the rest. Future books could get better about women and spend more time with Mike's family, including the obviously loved niece and nephew we barely glimpse. Failing that, at least we have this one adventure with Mike Kendall, with his blue-glinting eyes and his profile like a dissolute Pierrot, just trying to get to a point where he can say honestly, "I think this is something I could be good at, even if I am a fuck-up." This good time brought to you by my old-fashioned backers at Patreon.
I understand the exigencies of marketing, but every single poster I've seen for this movie makes the protagonist look significantly more badass than he is. You could call Mike Kendall (Hawkes) wiry if you were given to overstatement: he is a skinny sonofabitch in about the condition you'd expect from a man who drinks three meals a day with a lot of liquid grazing in between; his morning routine includes weightlifting in his garage, but since his idea of a sports drink is at least 4.9% ABV, it also inevitably includes throwing up. The most habitual expression on his creased and catlike face is a kind of wary wince, which combined with his spiky hair and his stumblebum unflappability lends him an involuntarily comic air, Buster Keaton with a wicked hangover. In drainpipe T-shirts and a black army jacket, he looks like an aging punk; in his best and most professional suit—which isn't very much of either of these things, not least because he keeps getting thrown out of bars in it—he tends to look like he just woke up at his own wake. He's a wreck, but a charming one, even if his smart mouth sinks job interviews faster than his unemployment checks can come in. Seventeen months ago he was a cop.
The title at this stage might be metaphorical or might be a callback to events we see framed in red-and-blue stutters of emergency light: the tragedy that prompted Mike's expulsion from the force was stupid and spectacular and he's luckier than he deserves that he isn't in jail. He lives in hope of getting his job back, but the deep-down knowledge that he kissed that hope goodbye the night his drunken gunslinging turned a bad scene into a shitshow may be part of what keeps him cracking open cold ones and chasing his AA meetings with bar crawls. For a while the plot ambles around town, following Mike on his nowhere-fast rounds. His sister (Octavia Spencer, also the film's executive producer) loves him, but the months of paying his mortgage are taking a predictable toll; her amiable husband (Anthony Anderson) is hitting his upper limit of dive bars. Even Mike's former colleagues (Michael Vartan and Daniel Sunjata) are losing patience with his cheery wheedling, particularly when he can't be bothered to sober up for it. Then one morning he wakes up in a field, flat on his back in a halo of trash. That's par for the course these days, but after he's peeled himself off the dirt and poured himself back into his car—a souped-up, aerosol-black Chevy Nova whose dashboard is where beer cans go to die; we first meet it parked halfway through a fence—the body he spots by the roadside is not, especially since the bloodied, unconscious young woman it belongs to is still breathing. Quick as an EMT, Mike loads her into the passenger seat and fishtails off to the nearest ER, but by the time he returns the next day with a potted plant and the bedazzled smartphone a carwash attendant found while mopping up the blood, his dark-haired, fur-wearing Jane Doe has died. He's stunned, as foolishly and swampingly devastated as if a baby bird had expired in his hands. His efforts to edge his way into the official investigation are not unkindly but non-negotiably rebuffed: "There is no 'we.' I know you found her, but you're not in this. In any way." There might not even be that much to investigate, just another runaway from a good home who fell into drugs and sex work and was beaten to death by a pimp or a john. But Mike feels responsible for her, not to mention generally useless, and he wants to do one thing right. So he does the only reasonable thing under the circumstances: put on his horrible suit, print up some fake business cards, and introduce himself to the girl's family as "Jack Winter," a private investigator who's willing to take the case for free.
So far, so demi-Chandler. Of course the killing of Kristy Nevil (Stefania Barr) is part of something bigger; of course our half-cocked hero is in over his head; of course his swinging wild at justice is going to endanger his family, scuffing back the carpet on a down-home-and-dirty underworld of hooking and blackmail, high school heroes and well-heeled businessmen and hitmen stonier than Mike on his scrappiest, most junkyard-dog day could hope to be. The basic blocks of this story are unchanged since the days of Black Mask magazine. But Hawkes never feels like he's imitating or parodying anyone, hanging out in the life of this sympathetic, a bit scuzzy, self-inflicted loser, and the world he inhabits shares his refreshing taste for slightly quirked reality over xeroxed pastiche. The titular small town may be nameless and fictional—the film was shot in Utah, although the California plates, mention of the St. John's River, and a remarkable shout-out to the valley quail set the action a few states over—but it feels neither dramatically overcooked nor genre-anonymous. The watering holes are properly skeevy and the sex trade is thriving, but the local economy is more straitened blue collar than Basin City. The big sky and the scattered suburban spaces give a high-country intimacy to the unwrapping plot; it's both looser and more believable that all the relevant people would know one another than if the same events were playing out in San Francisco, L.A., or even Salt Lake City. Most importantly, just because the Nelmses know about a trope doesn't mean they feel bound to observe it. Mike's not terrible at gumshoeing, but neither is he the maverick who's going to beat the flatfoots at their own game. Detectives Crawford and Whitman don't let him in on their leads not because they're bad people or even bad cops, but because he's a loose cannon and a mild-mannered liar and, oh, right, not actually police. There's something absurd and sad and dodgy in his self-reinvention as a DIY Sam Spade, but at the same time there's no more classically quixotic move. Eventually we meet the murdered girl's pimp (Clifton Collins Jr.), a gold-grilled lowrider who goes by the moniker of "Mood": with his heavily modded argon-purple Impala, his soundtrack of classic R&B, and declamatory lines like "Can't you see I'm conversating with this motherfucker?" he's performing the life as much as Mike is playing Jack Winter, P.I. and it tells us some of the same slantwise truth. The script doesn't romanticize him, but there's a sharp moment when he asks Kristy's wealthy, vengeance-minded grandfather (Robert Forster) to think about how she ended up on the street where Mood found her "rolling tricks for dime bags . . . You want to get all mystical and start searching for answers and shit, maybe you ought to think about what y'all did." It is perhaps a stretch that the grandfather should turn out to be handy with a high-powered rifle, but I have the impression a lot of Forster's characters are like that. Even the out-of-town hitmen (Jeremy Ratchford and James Lafferty) who serve the pure narrative purpose of threatening the characters we like have a couple of distinguishing eccentricities of their own, although mostly they have a lot of guns.
The script's one regrettably unexamined inheritance from its hardboiled forebears is its tendency to measure men's heroism or failure against a backdrop of women's bodies. It's not fridge central, but the town's eligible young women can't all be turning tricks out of sketchy bars. Of the non-young women, only Spencer's Kelly and the gravelly bartender played by Dale Dickey really get moments to shine, with honorable mention going to the waitressing ex-girlfriend (Michelle Lang) who not unjustifiably reminds Mike that "sometimes you're just such a shitheel, you know?" On the other hand, the film takes care with the lives of all of its non-white characters, which in a narrative about the possible redemption of a failbucket white dude turns out to matter to me. The overall handling of race is casual but not oblivious. Most of Mike's ex-colleagues are white. The friend group we glimpse at a birthday party for one of Kelly and Teddy's kids is mixed but majority Black. When asked what it was like being fostered into a Black family, Mike who has clearly been answering this question for most of his life deadpans, "Compared to starving and getting the shit beaten out of me by a couple of junkies, I thought it was pretty great."
I saw this movie on the last night of a week's run at the Apple Cinemas in Fresh Pond; I thought I was going to be the only person in the audience until two guys turned up during the opening credits and I'm not sure if one of them stayed till the end. As far as I can tell it played festivals last year and got a very limited theatrical release this month, but it appears to be available to stream online and I plan to buy the DVD on general grounds of signaling to the filmmakers that they should do more of this sort of thing, preferably with Hawkes and Spencer. It's a nice-looking movie, photographed by Johnny Derango with lots of natural light and a good eye for the surrounding geography; greens and reds in the night scenes make a nice change from the action-ubiquitous orange and blue. The climactic shootout in a railyard is never confusing for all its rolling stock and sodium light. I don't have much to say about the score by Chris Westlake, but I really appreciate that Mike's leitmotiv is "Good Times" by Eric Burdon & The Animals. Really what I resent about Small Town Crime is that it's not a novel, because if it were the first in a series I'd cheerfully read the rest. Future books could get better about women and spend more time with Mike's family, including the obviously loved niece and nephew we barely glimpse. Failing that, at least we have this one adventure with Mike Kendall, with his blue-glinting eyes and his profile like a dissolute Pierrot, just trying to get to a point where he can say honestly, "I think this is something I could be good at, even if I am a fuck-up." This good time brought to you by my old-fashioned backers at Patreon.
no subject
no subject
Thank you!
The film is available On Demand via my cable company, so I can watch it soon.
Awesome. I hope you like it! I hadn't even heard of it before the beginning of the week, when I tripped across a review, saw "neo-noir" and "John Hawkes," and decided that a movie in theaters would be a nice thing to do for myself: best case, it would be good, worst case, I'd get something to think about. It totally paid off. I am a little puzzled that it didn't get more of a theatrical release, but I do not understand the ways of studios. Increasingly I don't understand the ways of movie theaters, either. (The trend of huge squishy Barcalounger seats confuses me.)