I had missed The Lookout in theaters this spring. It's the directorial debut of writer Scott Frank, who has this great resume, having written Dead Again (a guilty pleasure of mine), Little Man Tate, Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Minority Report and The Interpreter, among others. Like Ben Affleck did with Gone Baby Gone, this is straight up story telling with no flashy flourishes; though it spends much more time on characterization.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Chris Pratt, a high school hockey star in Kansas City who had a brain injury in an accident and now struggles to perform every day tasks. Chris has problems remembering sequences and has to write things down to remember them. It's not quite as bad as "First pants, THEN your shoes" but it's close (actually, maybe it is that bad). There are some Momento-like elements but it's not told as a puzzle.
Jeff Daniels plays his blind roommate Lewis and they dream of opening a small restaurant together. Chris currently works as a night janitor at a bank and hopes to become a teller one day. He doesn't seem to realize this clashes with the restaurant dream. The first half is all character study of Chris dealing with his life, the second half tells how he gets mixed up with the wrong crowd which in this case is Gary's gang who plans to rob the bank Chris works at.
The end follows from what precedes it, in some ways rather nicely. However not everything set up comes back. Chris' family is a little too conveniently uncaring. And the thing I had the most problem suspending disbelief about was that Chris still drives.
I enjoyed it, but found it a little slow at times. When came out The Lookout got some reviews as the best movie of the year so far. Of course it came out March 30th.
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