Willy Vlautin's novel renders Portland's cost-of-living crisis through Lynette, a baker, bartender and escort desperate to buy the dilapidated house she shares with her mother and developmentally disabled brother. A last-minute plan collapses, forcing Lynette to call in favors and collect debts across a single night to make a down payment. The novel combines systemic injustice and violent crime drama while preserving character empathy and the city's texture. The Netflix adaptation, released August 15, omits substantial material and hybridizes characters, producing a disjointed film that struggles to reconcile Lynette's vulnerability with a contrived, thrilling hard edge.
It wasn't yet another national media story telling Portland about itself, but rather a book review-of a novel, no less. Portlander Willy Vlautin's The Night Always Comes rendered the city's cost-of-living crisis through one woman's torment. Somehow, the book knit a lifelike portrait of systemic injustice into a quick, violent crime drama that careens through a single, momentous night-escorts, guns, cocaine, and a stolen Mercedes-without selling out its characters or its city.
It's a story about the conditions that drive a person to commit crimes, a Portland story that puts a living, breathing face to the abstract notion of a "cost of living." What might you be capable of when everything you know is threatened? Lynette is a woman dragged by a particularly modern fate, not a professional criminal. But the movie, with its substantial omissions from the book and hybridizing of several characters, wants her to be both:
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