Today I’m looking at a pair of crime movies adapted from books by two of my favorite authors. I almost said “recent crime movies” because you know how time is, but it turns out one is more than five years old and the other is more than ten. It’s just that I put them off forever because I was afraid I was going to hate them. It turns out they’re both pretty well made movies, but yeah, I don’t think they have the spark I’m looking for.

LIFE OF CRIME (2013) is the adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s The Switch, about the time Ordell Robbie (Yasiin Bey, 16 BLOCKS) and Louis Gara (John Hawkes, NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW) kidnapped a rich guy’s wife. These are of course the characters he later returned to in Rum Punch, which was turned into JACKIE BROWN, so this has the novelty/pressure of being a sort-of prequel to a crime movie classic from a modern master, which I think most of us agree is either the best or second best Leonard adaptation ever. Good luck, writer/director Daniel Schechter (SUPPORTING CHARACTERS) living up to that.

Obviously he didn’t knock it out of the park, or you would’ve heard about it. Though I’d say it’s more on point tonally and ‘70s-period-wise than the movie of FREAKY DEAKY, it’s overall less fun. But I guess I just like this kinda stuff enough that I found it somewhat interesting.

One thing I didn’t expect for some reason is that Bey and Hawkes’ takes do somewhat match up with the performances of Samuel L. Jackson and Robert DeNiro as those characters. I was struck that at first Bey seemed to be doing a straight up Jackson imitation, quite successfully. Of course I am so familiar with his voice from his rap career that it’s impossible not hear his Mos-Def-isms too, but yeah, I accept that this guy will age into the Kangol wearing, pony tail having psycho from Tarantino’s movie. Hawkes’ Louis is required to be more with it and talkative than the character in JACKIE BROWN, and Hawkes reminds me more of a Harvey Keitel character than a DeNiro. But the Louis of JACKIE BROWN is in a different part of his life, burnt out from the prison stretch, and spending afternoons smoking weed. (It is kind of a bummer to think that the relatively honorable criminal in this one will end things the way he does in the other story.)

This is before they’re in L.A., when they’re in Leonard’s home base of Detroit. Ordell has this plot planned out to abduct Mickey Dawson (Jennifer Aniston, who had already been in THE SWITCH, the body-swapping comedy not based on the Leonard book), wife of shady real estate asshole Frank Dawson (Tim Robbins, HOWARD THE DUCK), and ransom her for a million dollars. They know about some crimes he’s involved in that they think will prevent him from going to the police. They invade her home wearing rubber masks of a mouse and Richard Nixon, in a scene that reminds me of Steven Soderbergh’s much better (but made after this) NO SUDDEN MOVE. And as in that one, obviously, many things will go wrong.

One of them is that Frank’s dipshit tennis buddy Marshall (Will Forte, NEBRASKA) has been making moves on Mickey, also knows her husband’s going out of town, and shows up at the house during the abduction. They lock him in a closet but when he escapes, instead of going to the police, he comes back to the house and starts cleaning up the crime scene. I guess to hide that he was trying to have an affair, and wasn’t heroic enough to save her? I can’t remember why he does this in the book, and it was unclear to me in the movie, but it is kind of fun how confusingly idiotic his choices are.

A bigger complication is that Frank’s reason for being out of town is to serve Mickey divorce papers while he’s in the Bahamas with his mistress Melanie (Isla Fisher, THE WEDDING CRASHERS). Yes, that is the same Melanie played by Bridget Fonda in JACKIE BROWN, but Fisher does not play her similarly or wear the cut-offs and bikini top Tarantino’s script called “her Melanie uniform.” I guess she gets more casual when Ordell is her sugar daddy. Anyway, Frank is a piece of shit so when they say they’ll kill his wife if he doesn’t pay up he figures that would save him some trouble.

Back at home the boys try not to let their hostage see them without their masks, and keep her locked up under the watch of Richard Monk (Mark Boone Junior, BATMAN BEGINS), whose collection of Nazi and white power shit seems to bother Louis more than Ordell. Then Louis really hates him when he discovers he has a peephole for spying on Mickey in the bathroom. This Nazi pervert is in many ways a pretty obvious character for Mark Boone Junior to play, but interestingly he plays him without his usual gruffness, so much so that for a second I questioned whether it was Boone or the guy who played Jerry on Parks and Recreation.

The pieces are all in place for various conflicts and rearrangements (including Melanie switching sides for fun and profit) but it doesn’t feel like it builds to much. Maybe part of the problem is that so much of it is about Louis trying to make things not as bad for Mickey, and protecting her from the others, while she slowly gets him to reveal things about himself and trust her, but I feel neither a romantic tension or a danger of him turning on her (despite what happens in JACKIE BROWN). That didn’t pay off much to me, but I did enjoy (SPOILER) the scene where Mickey and Frank are back home and he’s trying to play it off like he didn’t try to get her killed. Fun to see him have to sit in his discomfort.

THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY (2019) comes from a book by Charles Willeford that I absolutely loved. I read it many years ago and didn’t remember many specifics, but I remembered a reason why it was hard to imagine it working as a movie: it’s written in the first person, and its appeal comes from an untrustworthy narrator, an arrogant art critic who not only becomes gradually more obnoxious but who arrogantly justifies the horrible things he’s doing. As I assumed, the movie version has most of the same interesting events, but suffers greatly from taking a neutral perspective of them.

James Figueras (Claes Bang, THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER’S WEB, THE NORTHMAN) is an art critic introduced giving a lecture on an abstract painting, telling a story about its creator and meaning, convincing the audience that it’s a great work before admitting that he painted it himself and made up the story to demonstrate the power of criticism. A woman who came in late, Berenice (Elizabeth Debicki, WIDOWS), approaches him afterwards, and then it cuts to them at his apartment fucking. I can’t remember if this was in the book or if they took it from THE CONSTANT GARDENER. Then he invites Berenice on more of a real date, accompanying him on a visit to the estate of wealthy art collector Joseph Cassidy (Mick Jagger, FREEJACK).

During the visit Cassidy reveals the reason he summoned James: unbeknownst to the world, he has the legendarily reclusive painter Jerome Debney (Donald Sutherland, THE SPLIT) living in a cabin on his property, and knows that he recently read and loved a book by James. Cassidy believes he can arrange the first interview of Debney in decades. In exchange, he wants James to steal one of the paintings hidden in the cabin, the only existing Debneys since all the others were famously destroyed in fires. And by the way if you don’t do it I’ll expose something I know about your authentication services that will end your career.

Berenice is interested in the art, but she’s an outsider – she says she’s a teacher from Duluth, but she’s cagey about it in a way that makes James (and us) question if she’s up to something. She doesn’t seem that impressed by the legend of Jerome Debney, but she enjoys the friendship of an eccentric old man who is clearly charmed by her and tells her cute stories, while he does weird shit to James like making him hold his breath in the swimming pool to earn the interview.

Willeford is a really funny writer, but he can go very bleak. I think the dark humor of the book is very dry, and absent from the cinematic translation. So we get the oh damn, that’s fucked up of the book, but not the joy of hating this guy for his fucking audacity. If I may give you a SPOILER for both the movie and the book, there’s a point where he’s trying to forge a Debney painting, but in the book he’s doing his own highfalutin criticism of the fake painting, and seems to start believing his own bullshit. Can you believe this fuckin guy? This arrogant prick? What the fuck is wrong with him? That’s what I enjoyed about it.

But as played by Bang, written by Scott Smith (A SIMPLE PLAN, THE RUINS) and directed by Giuseppe Capotondi (THE DOUBLE HOUR), he’s not the same kind of fascinating psycho. It’s interesting to see him go from kind of an attractive, impressive guy to a desperate fuck up trying to pull off something really ridiculous, but it’s missing that dimension of him still trying to impress you. I think the movie sees him as cynical and dishonest, instead of absolutely full of the most shit anybody has ever been full of, and that change has the side effect of completely defanging the book’s satirical attack on the art world.

Really, while Bang and the always great Debicki are interesting characters, they’re both too exotic and good looking for this story. They’re the stars of an international crime thriller instead of a couple of dimwits (one pretentious, one regular) in over their heads. I hate to pull that “it’s different from the book” card, but I just think it’s sad that this is a narratively pretty faithful adaptation that would still give the uninitiated no idea why Willeford was great.

Oh well – the other three movies based on his books do a better job of that. They are COCKFIGHTER (also suffering from lack of first person perspective, but good anyway), MIAMI BLUES (the one that got me into him) and THE WOMAN CHASER (recently jumping from VHS to blu-ray in a fancy-ass edition from Cinematographe. I will revisit soon). If only I could see the unaired Scott Frank pilot for Hoke starring Paul Giamatti.