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CHANGING LANES
A fender bender on the FDR Drive is the springboard for an edgy and ugly psychological thriller from 2002 called Changing Lanes that works thanks to a richly complex screenplay and a pair of powerhouse lead performances.
Doyle Gipson (Samuel L. Jackson) an insurance salesmen struggling with sobriety and holding onto his family, is on his way to a custody hearing when he (literally) runs into Gavin Banek (Ben Affleck), a hotshot attorney on the road to partner whose career could be destroyed by a very different kind of court hearing for which he is en route. Banek is very curt to Gipson during the expected exchange of insurance information and in a rush to get to court, Banek loses a file crucial to his case which Gipson finds which jump starts this ugly game of cinematic cat and mouse.
This film works thanks to a brilliant screenplay by Chap Taylor which presents two central characters who are drawn in serious shades of gray. The story initially presents one of the characters as sympathetic but the story manipulates viewer sympathy where it is changing approximately every ten minutes of running time. Neither character does all right or all wrong and there are some things done by both characters in the name of vengeance and self-preservation that had this viewer's stomach tied in knots for the majority of the running time,
Director Roger Michell also displays a gift for letting us inside the character's motivations without ever foreshadowing what's going to happen. The camera works in tandem with the story to provide a story that is impossible to predict but doesn't frustrate with cinema red herrings or superfluous screen time. If I had a quibble with the story, I was a little troubled by the attention paid to the set-up of the character of Doyle as an alcoholic as a possible justification for his actions, but it was clarified to my satisfaction before the end credits rolled.
Samuel L. Jackson is intense and explosive as Doyle and Ben Affleck offers one of his strongest performances as Gavin. There's a solid supporting cast that serves the story including Sydney Pollack, Richard Jenkins, an appropriately greasy Dylan Baker, William Hurt, and especially Toni Collette but it is this fascinating story and the performances from the leads that make this one leap off the screen and scratch at the gut.
A fender bender on the FDR Drive is the springboard for an edgy and ugly psychological thriller from 2002 called Changing Lanes that works thanks to a richly complex screenplay and a pair of powerhouse lead performances.
Doyle Gipson (Samuel L. Jackson) an insurance salesmen struggling with sobriety and holding onto his family, is on his way to a custody hearing when he (literally) runs into Gavin Banek (Ben Affleck), a hotshot attorney on the road to partner whose career could be destroyed by a very different kind of court hearing for which he is en route. Banek is very curt to Gipson during the expected exchange of insurance information and in a rush to get to court, Banek loses a file crucial to his case which Gipson finds which jump starts this ugly game of cinematic cat and mouse.
This film works thanks to a brilliant screenplay by Chap Taylor which presents two central characters who are drawn in serious shades of gray. The story initially presents one of the characters as sympathetic but the story manipulates viewer sympathy where it is changing approximately every ten minutes of running time. Neither character does all right or all wrong and there are some things done by both characters in the name of vengeance and self-preservation that had this viewer's stomach tied in knots for the majority of the running time,
Director Roger Michell also displays a gift for letting us inside the character's motivations without ever foreshadowing what's going to happen. The camera works in tandem with the story to provide a story that is impossible to predict but doesn't frustrate with cinema red herrings or superfluous screen time. If I had a quibble with the story, I was a little troubled by the attention paid to the set-up of the character of Doyle as an alcoholic as a possible justification for his actions, but it was clarified to my satisfaction before the end credits rolled.
Samuel L. Jackson is intense and explosive as Doyle and Ben Affleck offers one of his strongest performances as Gavin. There's a solid supporting cast that serves the story including Sydney Pollack, Richard Jenkins, an appropriately greasy Dylan Baker, William Hurt, and especially Toni Collette but it is this fascinating story and the performances from the leads that make this one leap off the screen and scratch at the gut.