Small Crimes
A director is pre-packaged style with a built-in audience. That audience could be small or huge, but I've always thought that it is one thing a director brings to the table: the unshakeable belief that if they film this, someone will come. For the audience, they act as a seal of trust, a selling point – “from so and so who made That Thing You Liked”.
Now I suspect that Netflix will make directors not matter anymore. In the future, all that will matter is that a movie was made to your preferences, not who made it.
But I digress.
Joe Denton crashes back at his parents' house after his release from prison. He looks like a 40-year-old Shaggy from Scooby-Doo gone rogue. His mother treats him as a rowdy teen, not as a violent former cop and alcoholic whose raging drug addiction made him lose control and landed him in jail. When he finds out his wife took his daughters and moved away, he immediately falls off the wagon, a manipulative asshole going back to old habits.
Not that his old pals help. Like the old buddy of his who wants Joe to kill someone before they all get ratted out.
Small Crimes is a small-town noir, petty people trying to run their petty grafts, but where the everybody-knows-everybody-else air gives Joe little room to hide.
The dialogue is good, modern go-fuck-yourself noir without falling head-first into Tarantinisms. The way Nikolaj Coster-Waldau blurts out his lines as Joe, alternating between sorry as aggressive, shows how little the Joe himself believes in his own redemption. There's little remorse in the guy.
Good for Coster-Waldau. This is a much better choice than the B-list action fantasy movies that Gods of Egypt made me fear he was going to end up doing. It shows a range I didn't know he had in him.
He's no Viggo Mortensen, mind you. But he has a lot more in him than what Game of Thrones or Headhunters had shown.
The fact that he doesn't stand out is an accomplishment in and of itself. It goes with the movie's focus on the commonplace-ness of it all: a prostitute looks like an average person, instead of someone's tarted-up idea of an archetype; Robert Forrester and Jacki Weaver as Joe's old folks look weary and defeated, caring parents who can no longer deceive themselves about their son's behavior but see no way to change it; Macon Blair plays an old buddy who was in the army but looks like he just spends his time hunting for Budweiser and chips.
It's written by Blair, too, and his script seems to be aiming for the same natural quality that Jeremy Saulnier captured in Blue Ruin and Green Room. Blair is now trying his hand at writing and directing, and this is the second script of his that ends up on Netflix.
Might be a sign of things to come. Maybe Netflix will end up as a place for edge-cases and weirdos. People who would not get a major movie deal, or might even have trouble with indie distribution, finding a home on a service that knows there's an audience for them.
If that's the case, I'm all for it. About time something good came out of all the data mining and behavioral analysis.
(Published originally on Filmsnark, my old blog)