Netflix Original #1 - Small Crimes

Small Crimes

Director - Evan Katz
Writers - Evan Katz and Macon Blair

Cast - Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Robert Forster, Jacki Weaver, Gary Cole, Molly Parker

"I payed my time. I just want everything to stay in the past."

Our entry into the world of Small Crimes is a pull out focusing on Joe Denton (Coster-Waldau) mid-conversation with a priest discussing the trials and tribulations of his life. He is a former cop being released from prison after a 6 year stint for attempted murder absentmindedly playing with his latest chip from AA. The priest offers Joe communion but he refuses it, taking his sins with him into the world.

Joe moves back in with his parents (Forster and Weaver) with whom he has a weary, lived-in chemistry and quickly finds his past coming back to haunt him as former partner Lt. Pleasant (Cole) informs Joe about the threat of his prior transgressions being revealed in the deathbed confessions of another officer. In the process of dealing with this dying officer Joe meets Charlotte (Parker), the nurse, and strikes up a romantic relationship her. By the end of the movie these various elements will all have collided as well as Joe and Pleasant's efforts to finish what they started with Phil (Michael Kinney), the man bearing the scars of Joe's crimes

"I'd say it feels good to see you again but I feel sick just being this close."

In this film most everybody Joe encounters knows him as "Slash Cop" and very quickly the burden of trying to escape that stigma becomes too much. Joe is a man who just wants to get his life back together and see his daughters (the mother has wisely taken them far away and barred Joe from contacting them) but when facing a grim, unsympathetic world he is forced to become the man who went to jail again. Joe is constantly trying to move ahead of his past. Katz shows this multiple times playing the sound of the engine revving of Joe's pickup while he is still walking away from a scene.

Actually these various plot elements and forces are the movie's biggest flaw. Running a scant 90 minutes very few of these story lines get to fully fleshed out and most fail to make the desired impact. The entirety of the plot surrounding the former cop dying of cancer is laid out in various Gary Cole monologues and while Cole gives a good performance, that just isn't enough to fully comprehend the story let alone fully care about it. The one story that does work incredibly well is Joe's relationship with his parents. Robert Forster and Jacki Weaver are great as Joe's parents who just want him to move past his life and become a normal person and these tensions with Joe as he struggles to do this lead to several great scenes with them including a fantastic ending to the film.

Evan Katz and Macon Blair's screenplay seems to go out of its way to be vague about details (we never know what these deathbed confessions actually are) and avoid the expected outcome of events. This vagueness adds to general lack of care in the story. Upending expectations can be a great thing but it just doesn't work here. For example during his first night back home Joe finds himself at a bar and ends up driving a woman out to the middle of nowhere where he is ambushed by her friends yet he easily fends them off and yet this side of Joe is never seen again in the movie, especially when he needs it. You could say it's because he is trying to move past that of himself but the movie doesn't really sell that.

Overall Small Crimes is a vague, mostly uniformly weary neo-noir with too much going on much like Joe himself. The stuff that works, really works and none of it is particularly bad. Fans of thses types of movies are encouraged to check this one out but temper your expectations. This is almost a decent 90's Elmore Leonard adaptation with most of the clever dialogue removed about how hard it is to earn a second chance.

Schurmann Score - 6/10