James Mooney (Josh O'Connor) is a man without a plan. With his dim-witted accomplices, he stages a heist at a Massachusetts art gallery but is soon forced on the run when the law comes to call, followed by members of a local crime cartel. Kelly Reichardt's film is a whipsmart and subversive take on the all-American crime caper, with shades of Sidney Lumet in the funny and nail-bitingly tense first half especially.
On The Lowdown, the action picks up where it left off last week, and characters drift in and out of Lee's story, freed from the burden of an arc. The looseness (so far) works for me, because Lee Raybon's fast days don't end. His misadventures crash into one another. His problems accumulate. His arc is crescendoing chaos. The looseness also mirrors something rare and powerful about Lee himself: how he authors his own fate, sets his own hectic pace, never checks a calendar.
He sniffs around Tulsa, Oklahoma, digs through people's trash, repeatedly makes a mess of things and mostly gets hostile responses from the people who have the misfortune of crossing paths with him (pretty much the world a raccoon lives in). But, every so often, someone will find Lee adorable or sympathetic enough that they just might lend him a helping hand, or even take him to bed with them.
In Mare of Easttown, the previous Delaware County-set series that Brad Ingelsby made for HBO, solving crimes was women's work: Kate Winslet's blowsy, grimacing turn as a detective in a Philly exurb was thrilling to watch not just for her flattened vowels and bone-deep sighs but for her character's authority. Looking more exhausted than any TV character in recent memory, Mare investigated murders, raised her grandson, and presided over her community with questionable ethics but unfailing care.
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.
