new to home video: Small Town Crime

Small Town Crime is advertised as a comedy, but it's really not. I've noticed that studios tend to do that with movies that they don't really know what to do with, and I can sort of understand that reaction to this film. It's a "quirky comedy" without the comedy, which is not to say it's a failed comedy, so much as that the laughs are intentionally few and far between.

As I was watching -- and enjoying -- Small Town Crime, I was also trying to figure out what exactly it is. At first, I thought, "Tarantinoesque," and then I amended that thought. It wasn't wrong, exactly, but it wasn't spot-on, either. Then I realized it with a mental "shoulda been obvious" slap to the forehead: Small Town Crime is an homage to the hard-boiled mystery novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and their ilk, the kind of movies that at one point would have starred Humphrey Bogart. Remove the cell phones, and this could have very well been a Bogart movie back in the day. It's not parody, by any means, but, like its predecessors in the 1950s and earlier, it does sport an occasional dry wit.

That sort of explains why I thought of Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino's movies are all about paying homage to yesteryear, and he would have had a ball with this material. But as much as I admire him as a filmmaker, he may not have been right for this particular story. He might have pushed the nudges and winks to the audience too far. Directors/ writers Eshom Nelms and Ian Nelms get it just right.

John Hawkes stars (and right there's your first quirk, because the phrase "John Hawkes stars" is almost never uttered) as Mike Kendall, an alcoholic, unemployed mess. An opening montage of him botching a series of job interviews ends with a punchline: He finally gets a job offer, and then decides to end the interview with a little too much honesty, intentionally tanking the opportunity. We then see that his unemployment check is larger than the  potential salaries from minimum-wage jobs he seems to qualify for, and understand that his unemployment is less out of desperation and more out of lifestyle choice. He's gaming the system, and how you feel about this decision -- whether we focus on the cleverness of the choice, or its dishonesty -- probably depends less on Kendall himself, and more on how you personally feel about the welfare system.

Kendall used to be a cop, but he was forced to resign in disgrace, after his partner was fatally shot on the job, and it was discovered that Kendall was drunk at the time. Now Kendall spends his time drinking in bars, intentionally bumbling job interviews, and mooching off his his adopted sister  Kelly (Octavia Spencer) and her husband Teddy (Anthony Anderson). It's certainly fair to say that Kelly and Teddy enable Kendall's unhealthy, unwise lifestyle: Kelly lets him know that she disapproves of his choices, but still gives him money whenever he asks for it, and Teddy's even worse, enabling Kendall as his frequent drinking partner. They all mean well, but nobody's doing Kendall any favors.

After a few scenes -- just enough to establish Kendall's self-destructive patterns -- the story is set in motion when he stumbles upon the badly beaten body of a young woman on the side of the road. Kendall rushes her to the hospital, but she dies shortly afterward. The police treat it as a low priority because she was a prostitute, the parents are distraught but uninterested in pursuing the mystery of who killed her, and Kendall feels that someone has to care, so he gets involved despite the advice of  one of his few remaining police friends, Detective Crawford (Michael Vartan). Presenting himself as a private investigator, Kendall teams up with the only other person who seems to care about the dead girl, an outraged grandfather played by Robert Forster.

The role of Steve Yendel is very much "the Robert Forster role" that the actor has specialized in since Tarantino created it with Jackie Brown in 1997: that of a sensitve but tough aging man, someone whose face shows decency and vulnerability, but whose tone of voice lets you know that he's dangerous if pushed too far. Forster plays this type of role time and time again precisely because he does it so well.

The dual mysteries of who killed the girl, and why they killed her, become obsessions with Kendall, and lead him to a series of encounters with various lowlifes. Meanwhile, the sympathetic Crawford and his verbally abusive partner occasionally show up, playing the  "Good Cop/ Bad Cop" mixed-message routine as they alternately demand Kendall stop investigating, and yet also insist on him giving them any information he may have already learned.

All of this will sound very familiar to anyone who's seen the Bogie/ John Huston version of The Maltese Falcon, or, for that matter, any movie in that vein. Yes, it's all been done before, but rarely so well, and certainly not in a long time. It's a better-than-decent mystery, with excellent character work, and a rare chance for Hawkes to shine in a central role. (Off the top of my head, the only other example I can think of is The Sessions.) Okay, you may not care about the acting career of John Hawkes. But if you like a good story, I still highly recommend Small Town Crime. I'd gladly watch Hawkes reprise the role in a sequel. It's that good.