All the Road Rage
By Michael Sean McGowan
A roadside tussel turns into a war of wills- and words- in
"Changing Lanes," a brilliant fable about having and losing it all.
Changing Lanes is a movie about small men with enormous
flaws. Two of them have an accident on the FDR one rainy Friday morning and by
the time the day has done each will have insulted and threatened each other,
pleaded, destroyed their reputations, apologized, and have given serious thought
to eliminating the other- only to try to find a way to make up for it.
Essentially, it is about people you meet everyday.
In classic parable fashion, the two men couldn’t be more
different. Gavin Banek (Ben Affleck) is a green junior partner with a
multi-million dollar Manhattan law firm. He drives a silver-bullet sports car
and rationalizes getting a senile tycoon to sign away his estate to his firm,
but takes on the cowering disposition of a whipped puppy when danger is near.
Doyle Gibson (Samuel L. Jackson), on the other hand, is the kind of person with
a compulsion to dive into trouble head-first (“You’re addicted to chaos,” his
enraged AA sponsor tells him). We know that his marriage is in trouble- and we
could be kind to imagine that, at best, it was a rocky union to begin with. His
wife is planning to move to Oregon with her kids and Doyle has few illusions-
she’s trying to get as far away from him as possible. He still, though, clings
to a fanatical hope that a pending bank loan to buy a house in Queens will
convince her that he is stable enough to take another chance on.
One can guess that if these two had met under different
circumstances, they would have become the best of friends.
But too much is already at stake when the two cars collide.
Banek is in a rush to deliver papers to court proving that the afore mentioned
tycoon signed over a massive trust fund to the control of his firm (the document
is legitimate, but Banek will, as the day drags on, question the means through
which it was signed). Doyle is also heading to court for one last plea to his
wife- only to find one tire blown out when he skids into a median. He tries to
swap insurance information, but Banek blows him off with a signed blank check
and a “better luck next time.”
It is the file that sets everything in motion- the one with
the papers that could either exonerate Banek and his firm or embroil them in a
fraud case. It is the same file he leaves at the accident- and the same file
that Doyle, angry and drenched, picks up.
Changing Lanes isn’t a legal thriller- nor is it a thriller
at all if you are imagining it as a kind of Death Wish for our New Millennium
topic-of-the-moment sensation fix. When Banek conveniently tries to make amends
and retrieve the file, he discovers how useless his alligator tears and bribes
are to a man who, too often, has seen the floor cut out from underneath of him
(Doyle’s tardiness to the courtroom has caused him to lose custody). But the
file is meaningless and even the lengths each man will go to redress the harm
done to him in one upsman fashion isn’t focused on as much as the moments that
can be compared to an alcoholic’s moment of clarity- where each decide that
enough is enough and try to break the insane cycle. Take a moment where Banek,
after getting Doyle arrested, walks into Doyle’s bank, poses as his lawyer, and
pleads with them to let Doyle’s loan get through. This may seem like a cynical,
last ditch effort to romance Doyle into surrendering the file- if we hadn’t seem
the moments before of Banek looking thoroughly disgusted with what he had done.
Yet the tragic fate of the film is that as each man is ready to make amends- the
other comes out swinging and the whole thing starts over again.
Changing Lanes is directed by Roger Mitchell, a man who I’ll
have to watch closely in the future considering that he, despite mathematical
impossibilities, also made a romantic comedy that I actually liked; 1999’s
Notting Hill. The two films actually aren’t that different- they are both about
smart, strong-willed individuals whose personalities can lead to some
spectacular disasters. They also feature strong supporting characters who either
stand back and support- or drop their jaws in horror. Toni Collette, in an
almost unrecognizable blonde wig, plays Banek’s secretary and former lover, who
announces her displeasure at seeing a man that we can see she genuinely once
loved becoming “one of them.”
It is Affleck and Jackson who provide the story with most of
its juice and keep the chain strong. Jackson, infinitely adept at playing
characters of high intelligence and high emotion, may, hopefully, get a long
overdue Oscar nod for this. As far as Affleck, I have heard some critics carp
that his role is nothing more than a reusable cut-out- a hand-me down from the
same moral-less slickster he played in Boiler Room. These people have missed the
boat. Watch him in some key scenes- when he realizes that his precious file is
missing, when he returns to the firm and is confronted with the inevitable
question “how did it go?” and see his pathos-laced dance that is as saddening as
it is pathetic. Only an actor of great gift or determination could pull this off
as convincingly.
The feel of the movie could almost pass as a documentary-
finely scripted dialogue (the kind that is designed to actually let characters
speak, not just move the story along) overflows from one scene to the next until
we have one person’s pained monologue narrating another’s actions. I can forgive
the movie’s strained ending- where it seems to try to push a sunny outcome
through all this mist- in a film that, otherwise, doesn’t cease to surprise me.
I still think of a scene in Banek’s office as he interviews an intern- this
after all the hours deceit and anger and retribution are still fresh on his
mind. The kid goes onto a long, didactic speech about the honor of the law and
its value in civilization. At this point I was expecting Banek to cut him off
with a curt “bulls***.” Banek doesn’t say this- but what he does say caught me
off guard.
Changing Lanes is currently #1 at the box office- hopefully a
sign that audiences can still appreciate a film that looks at the complex
motivations of people rather than slapping them with wholesale, one-word motives
like “love” or “revenge.” It is as intriguing as it is important as it is scary.
Why? Take a long look at the people here and what they do and see if, after a
while, you don’t begin to recognize part of yourself in this whole chaos of
things. A