Film review: Life of Crime

The movie Life of Crime preserves Elmore Leonard’s brilliant dialogue, upon which it is based

Jennifer Aniston, left, in Life of Crime. Courtesy Italia Film

Life of Crime

Director: Daniel Schechter

Starring: Jennifer Aniston, Mos Def, Isla Fisher, Will Forte, John Hawkes, Tim Robbins, Mark Boone Junior

Three stars ⋆⋆⋆

Some may pine for George Clooney’s chin or Scarlett Johansson’s lips, but no body part should be more envied in an Elmore Leonard adaptation than Elmore Leonard’s ear.

The author’s dialogue seemed to have walked in off the street. He filled countless pages with the stuff, capturing with preternatural acuity the diverse, often ungrammatical and frequently comic ping-ponging sounds of American voices shooting the breeze. And he did it, like a magician, without showing his hand.

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it,” was one of his 10 rules. He probably would have rewritten these sentences.

It's why Leonard has been so alluring to filmmakers – and also why adapting his work is so difficult. His talky, screenplay-friendly books have already produced about 20 movies – including Out of Sight, Jackie Brown, Get Shorty and 3:10 to Yuma and several TV shows, not least the pulpy Justified.

A year after his death comes Life of Crime, which was the opening film at last year’s Abu Dhabi Film Festival.

It is a largely faithful and appropriately admiring adaptation of his 1978 novel, The Switch, which has three very good things going for it: the crinkled face of John Hawkes, the nasal deadpan of Yasiin Bey (better known as Mos Def) and Jennifer Aniston in the kind of comedic-dramatic part she should have always been playing.

Hawkes and Bey play a pair of Detroit criminals – Louis Gara and Ordell Robbie, respectively, who conspire to kidnap Mickey (Aniston), the wife of Frank Dawson (Tim Robbins), a suburban sleazeball. Their plan to hold her goes awry when the plot is one-upped by others swirling around Dawson with equally unsavoury motives.

Dawson has sneaked off with his mistress (Isla Fisher) to the Bahamas, where he’s hiding money skimmed off his business and is plotting a divorce. Is getting rid of his wife even a threat?

The director Daniel Schechter gives the film a thick 1970s atmosphere, cribbing a bit from an adaptation of another crime fiction classic, The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

The vintage glow and period soundtrack are fitting, but also somewhat stifling. Checked trousers and Hawkes (destined to one day play The Band’s Rick Danko) fit almost too snugly.

Though it has a capable cast – it's a particular pleasure to hear how Bey's Ordell reasons his association with a racist Nazi – and it hues closely to Leonard's dialogue, Life of Crime is missing the colourful snappiness of the novelist's prose.

* AP