Changing Lanes (2002)
Street Legal
Film of the Month: Changing Lanes
Ryan Gilbey wonders if the politics of
Changing Lanes
are
shift stick or unthinkingly automatic
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Samuel
L. Jackson has not yet provided compelling evidence that he can
play much besides funky hipsters (Pulp Fiction, The Long Kiss Goodnight)
or righteous avengers (A Time to Kill), but the conscientious thriller
Changing Lanes hints there are fresh ambiguities to be mined in
the latter category. Here Jackson plays Doyle Gipson, whose abstinence
from alcohol does little to temper his temper after a collision
on New York's FDR Drive with hotshot attorney Gavin Banek (Ben Affleck).
Doyle tries to act honourably. It is he who refuses Gavin's offer
of a blank cheque, and later he will also make an attempt to return
to Gavin the important legal document - the film's macguffin - the
attorney has inadvertently discarded. In both instances Doyle's
good nature goes unappreciated. In the first Gavin speeds off to
court, leaving Doyle - who also has a court appointment, to stop
his ex-wife and young sons from moving state - stranded on the freeway.
In the second Doyle's altruism comes too late to prevent Gavin's
visit to Mr Finch, a computer hacker who renders Doyle bankrupt
with the touch of a button.
The screenplay, by Michael Tolkin (The Player, Deep Cover) and
debutant Chap Taylor, sometimes seems poised to commit the ultimate
heresy of making a main character in a Hollywood movie unsympathetic:
in one scene Doyle clubs two casually racist strangers with a telephone
receiver. But the film is always careful to mitigate his aggression.
The risk in removing from Doyle all responsibility for his actions
is that the picture can appear to mollycoddle him - you can sense
him being groomed for the role of martyr on the long, bad Good Friday
on which the movie takes place. A kind of resurrection, on the other
hand, awaits Doyle's tormentor, played by Affleck with a swaggering
arrogance so vivid you can almost smell cologne and crisp hundred-dollar
bills whenever he's on screen. Affleck has more room for manoeuvre
than Jackson, partly because he isn't called on to solicit the audience's
sympathy. The pleasure of watching Affleck forcibly relieved of
his security and complacency will be relished by anyone who enjoyed
seeing Cary Grant sullying his suit in North by Northwest, Jeff
Daniels getting blood on his in Something Wild or Will Smith losing
his altogether in Enemy of the State. It's one of modern cinema's
favourite spectator sports: the ritual humiliation of the privileged
male.
The memory of Joel Schumacher's Falling Down is also invoked, though
here the audience gets two Michael Douglases for the price of one
as Doyle and Gavin lapse into a game of tit-for-tat that affords
both men numerous chances to blow a gasket. The thrill of these
scenes - Doyle unscrewing a wheel on Gavin's car; Gavin convincing
a school principal that Doyle is a budding kidnapper - is refreshingly
primitive: it's just schoolyard hi-jinks, and only a few gears up
from the petty vengeances of Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito in
Tin Men. It's a serious problem, though, that the writers haven't
worked out how to put the brakes on this part of the film, or how
to end the movie. It was charitable of Tolkin and Taylor to give
the audience a burst of dumb pleasure in the middle of such a didactic,
hotheaded picture. But perhaps they shouldn't be surprised that
we experience a steep come-down in the final 30 minutes during which
several unconvincing situations are smuggled past our eyes, among
them Gavin's sudden redemption, brought on by witnessing the purifying
tears of Doyle's children, and Doyle's ability to sneak past the
security nightshift and appear in Gavin's office.
It's
a measure of the picture's persuasive urgency that such discrepancies
are not always immediately apparent. That's not just its visual
urgency - though the film's vocabulary of whip-pans, out-of-focus
zooms, handheld tracking shots and jarring cuts ensures that even
the most hardened Dogme buff may have difficulty getting comfortable
in that multiplex seat. (Only the stuttering, garage-inflected loops
of David Arnold's score are overused in pursuit of suspense.) But
it also becomes apparent that British director Roger Michell has
a need to get the story told, and to get it told properly.
That kind of efficiency can be valuable for a viewer. Michell has
some dubious passages to work with - such as the moment when Gavin
is summoned to a restaurant by his demure wife, whose endorsements
of institutionalised infidelity mark her out as the movie's real
villain. No director could make sense of a scene like that, whose
only function is to give the audience someone to boo (or rather,
someone else: as Gavin's boss and father-in-law, Sydney Pollack
contributes another study in middle-aged corruption to rank alongside
his performances in Husbands and Wives and Eyes Wide Shut). But
Michell polishes it off briskly, maintaining the same low hum of
menace he brings to the intimidating bustle of the courthouse or
to the deserted bar where Doyle tries not to drink the tantalising
bourbon he's just ordered. It's almost funny that Michell came to
this job after a heart attack had prevented him from directing Captain
Corelli's Mandolin - it would be difficult to imagine a movie less
redolent of rest and recuperation than Changing Lanes.
Film-makers are commonly heard to discuss the cities or architecture
in their work as characters in their own right, and Michell would
have good reason to do so - his vision of New York is characterised
by a rancid energy rarely seen since that other great Big Apple
movie by a British director, Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell
of Success (1957). (It's also a sight more convincing than the Habitat
London of his last movie Notting Hill.) The most recent picture
to succeed fully in this aim was Taylor Hackford's 1997 The Devil's
Advocate, which put a weird new spin on streets that must be overfamiliar
even to someone who's never set foot outside Surbiton. Changing
Lanes - which argues more convincingly than The Devil's Advocate
that lawyers are the new satanists - depicts a city of stinging
contrasts: between the boastful art collection (Mark Rothko, Andreas
Gursky) on the walls of the law firm and the creepy children's drawings
tacked up in Mr Finch's office; between affluence and poverty; between,
quite simply, Gavin and Doyle.
It's odd that no one involved with Changing Lanes appears to have
noticed that the narrative actively upholds those divisions. At
the end of the film power over black lives still resides in white
hands, just as it did in Trading Places, a movie to which Changing
Lanes is more closely related than it would care to admit. It's
Gavin's assurances that persuade Doyle's ex-wife to thaw out. The
film says to its white viewers: Don't be Old Nick when you can be
St Nick - play Santa Claus to a black family in your neighbourhood
today. The message is only reinforced by the music over the closing
credits: Annie Lennox's sanitised reading of Bob Marley's 'Waiting
in Vain'. It's a choice that says more about white treatment of
black culture, and about the film's target audience, than the film-makers
can possibly realise.
Eric Gilbert