Up until its bogus everything-must-go ending (insanely belying the movie's honest grapple beforehand with the impossibility of avoiding selling out), CHANGING LANES brings you back to gritty, downbound dramas of ethics circa late-seventies--no-exit pictures like Ulu Grosbard's STRAIGHT TIME and Sidney Lumet's PRINCE OF THE CITY. It starts as an almost abstract fantasia on the differences between two Americans: a white guy (Ben Affleck) who lives in a glass tower of a law office with fake Alex Katzes on the world; at the end of a hard day he comes home to Amanda Peet and a present--his father-in-law's old forty-foot yacht, thrown him as a bonus. The second American is a black guy (Samuel L. Jackson) grappling with his sobriety, wrestling his Rageaholic Issues, and trying to buy a house to keep his estranged wife and kids nearby. White and Black collide, literally, on the FDR Drive, and the rest of the movie Aristotelianly tracks their crosses and double-crosses and triple-crosses in the course of a single wearying, life-wrecking day.
Unlike the "issue" TV CHANGING LANES sometimes feels like, the work of the screenwriters, Chap Taylor and Michael Tolkin (one suspects Tolkin rewrote the younger writer) has a feeling of uncanny end-of-nineties accuracy--unsteady fat cats feeling their cooked books coming home to roost, and have-nots getting steadily angrier at their have-notness. All the details are pleasurably right, down to the tinkly, Bryn Mawr voice Amanda Peet puts on to read a Paddy Chayefsky-like speech informing her callow husband that indeed, the world is corrupt, and why did he think she was with him anyhow? The director, Roger Michell (who made the passably pleasing NOTTING HILL) doesn't seem headed for the big leagues, but deploys one extremely useful stylistic device: big, algae-oid, wobbly soft closeups that harden into focus, of a sort, when the faces loom close to the lens. You'd think this shtik would exhaust quickly; it doesn't. The images get at the theme of the movie: the tireless pressures of the way the world is organized to get people to do the wrong thing over and over again. Tolkin, Taylor, Michell and company essay this hardheadedly, unsentimentally, more probingly than you expected; then they blow it with that candy-handing ending. It was, I guess, probably the only way the movie could get made--especially under the shockingly conservative aegis of Paramount Pictures.
Unlike the "issue" TV CHANGING LANES sometimes feels like, the work of the screenwriters, Chap Taylor and Michael Tolkin (one suspects Tolkin rewrote the younger writer) has a feeling of uncanny end-of-nineties accuracy--unsteady fat cats feeling their cooked books coming home to roost, and have-nots getting steadily angrier at their have-notness. All the details are pleasurably right, down to the tinkly, Bryn Mawr voice Amanda Peet puts on to read a Paddy Chayefsky-like speech informing her callow husband that indeed, the world is corrupt, and why did he think she was with him anyhow? The director, Roger Michell (who made the passably pleasing NOTTING HILL) doesn't seem headed for the big leagues, but deploys one extremely useful stylistic device: big, algae-oid, wobbly soft closeups that harden into focus, of a sort, when the faces loom close to the lens. You'd think this shtik would exhaust quickly; it doesn't. The images get at the theme of the movie: the tireless pressures of the way the world is organized to get people to do the wrong thing over and over again. Tolkin, Taylor, Michell and company essay this hardheadedly, unsentimentally, more probingly than you expected; then they blow it with that candy-handing ending. It was, I guess, probably the only way the movie could get made--especially under the shockingly conservative aegis of Paramount Pictures.