If you’re sick of guns, sick of crime stories and sick of Liam Neeson and you have the stomach for only one new jaded detective movie this year, make it Too Late. Even if you hate it (and there’s a good chance that you will since this film is out to lunch from the start), I think you’ll enjoy hating it. If you love it, you’re gonna feel like you just took a monster bong hit and are now good for the day.
It’s a story told in only five scenes, each one a (mostly) single unbroken shot that follows the characters from room-to-room, from place-to-place and clear down the street. It’s got to be the easiest job that film editor David Heinz has ever taken. Also, it’s all out of chronological sequence. It begins somewhere in the middle, then goes to the climax, then rewinds and gets even more haywire from there.
Call it a gimmick, I call it good noir. First rule of the genre: Everyone in it is as doomed as Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign. Even if they don’t die, they’ll never be happy. They’ve seen too much and done too many things that they shouldn’t have. Noir is built on pessimism. If it’s optimistic about anything, call it something else.
And this movie is pessimistic as all living fuck. Its weird structure is partly a well-played trick and partly a twisting of the noir knife. It deliberately kills off characters and then shows them burning bright in the next scene, a candle that we know is about to get snuffed. Tragedy is a presence even in this film’s few warm moments.
The second rule of noir: NONE of this stuff needs to make much sense. It’s perfectly fine for characters to talk in dark and snappy poetry. Coincidences are also allowed, even a few cheap ones. Noir is a strange impression of life, never a mirror image. We’re happy to let the cinematographer go hog wild with style in a noir; why not the screenwriter, too? It’s a tightrope for sure, and writer/director Dennis Hauck (making his feature debut) nearly falls to his death a few times walking it, but he makes it across, sweaty and shaking and with piss running down his leg, but alive. He gets it. His ridiculous risks here are part of the show.
This wouldn’t be nearly as good with a linear structure. At first, this plays like a standard take on the classic scenario of one private detective and one dead girl, but it becomes something more as it unfolds. It goes backwards and forwards because it deals with a lead character (a terrific John Hawkes, thin as a matchstick and just as precariously smoldering) who cannot open up. He makes his living uncovering secrets as he has secrets of his own that he refuses to tell, even to us. When the revelations happen, they slip out in the middle of one of the long takes here. It’s as if the director of the film is the detective himself, aching to free himself of his sad story, but unwilling to tart it up. Best to let the camera roll and let it see what it sees. A man marked for death cares little for craft.
In addition to being a good movie, this film also deserves a salute for being a rare analog statement in a digital world. It was shot on old-fashioned film, with each scene roughly the length of a single reel and the theatrical screenings were strictly 35mm.
It’s doomed characters presented in a doomed format. What the hell is more noir than that?