Changing Lanes

directed by Roger Michell
written by Chap Taylor and Michael Tolkin
starring Ben Affleck, Samuel L. Jackson, Kim Staunton, Toni Collette
USA, 2002

B-

Changing Lanes gives us the crowded and crazy dystopia of New York City to Woody Allen’s ultra-American cultural utopia. Can anyone imagine a lonelier place to be while having a bad day? Director Roger Michell’s New York is appropriately overcast, not sunlit, and the characters aren’t afforded the luxury of ducking into comforting locales like Woody’s movie theaters and smoky nightclubs. This worst-case scenario is like watching the city and its people turn bipolar. Two men – Mr. Black and Mr. White, Upper Class and Not-So-Rich – are united in New Yorker frustration: insurance salesman Samuel L. Jackson has had a very lousy day because that white asshole yuppie lawyer Ben Affleck is taking advantage of his poorness and his blackness, and Affleck is in turn threatened by the black man (for whom he’ll later, so charitably, buy a house) so viciously taking his recovering-alcoholic, divorced-father anguish out on him and his life-or-death orange-red file. Their fateful car crash steals too much time – in short supply on city weekdays – and now Jackson’s ex-wife gets custody of the children and Affleck looks down the barrel of imprisonment for fraud. I was held in suspense, wondering if these virulent Man’s Men would be caught crying or screaming, and shocked that they didn’t just immediately crumble in despair. Of course, it is Affleck who cries on-camera and Jackson who throws the computer monitor at the window. William Hurt plays the White Angel.

There are some odd, amateurish moments in the movie, as when the camera transitions to a different scene by pulling into a close-up of Ben’s straight head of hair, and when the movie ends with the irrelevant Annie Lennox cover of the Bob Marley love song “Waiting in Vain.” Apart from the scanty references to race and class relations, and basic silliness, Salvatore Totino’s cinematography, the sound design, and even, at times, the buzzing score are brutally accurate, and the setting is not just Urban America but is specifically a suffocating New York City painted in the grays of alienation and vast impossibility – all the hectic commutes and family turmoil in cramped flats and scarred streets that allow no room for breathing. It is as one-sided and as desperately true as Woody Allen’s love poems because New York is both Heaven and Hell – the epicenter of American extremity (at least for this rapturous tourist). The lead roles of two good-natured working men are modern archetypal figures, but the acting is solid enough, always evocative, often one-noted. The only villains are the stick figures of pure and simple corruption, including a pricelessly hilarious Sydney Pollack. The slicey-dicey illustration of the Innocent Mother – the black woman tormented by the stereotypical enraged-black-male syndrome – is brought to life by Kim Staunton, who is Network’s Beatrice Straight, but better, and, sadly, just as hampered.

Ben Affleck gets special treatment, with several fawning close-ups of his modelicious cleft chin. In one scene, at the end of his tether, he stumbles into a church, and I was reminded of The Bicycle Thief’s church scene. While Michell is no De Sica, and we never get a feeling for God’s remoteness (in fact, the movie eventually affirms the existence of Godly benevolence), his movie does have similarities to that classic Italian portrait about a man pursuing the stolen bike required for his job. Changing Lanes is a limited yet engaging thriller, a moral pipe dream of reality, and a how-to handbook for ordinary people who see themselves tearing through the red tape of American sin. It sees morality financially. It’s the Hollywood God coming down to play with the little people, planting fires with magnifying glasses, then proclaiming De Sica simply defeatist with a flash of its own smiley optimism. Actually, it’s Hollywood’s own neorealism.

By Andrew Chan [JULY 29, 2002]