Taglines: Right target, wrong woman.
Based on Elmore Leonard’s novel “The Switch,” Life of Crime is a dark caper comedy starring Jennifer Aniston, John Hawkes, Yasiin Bey, Will Forte, Mark Boone Junior, Isla Fisher and Tim Robbins. The wife (Jennifer Aniston) of a corrupt real estate developer (Tim Robbins) is kidnapped by two common criminals (yasiin bey and John Hawkes), who intend to extort him with inside information about his crooked business and off-shore accounts. But the husband decides he’d actually rather not pay the ransom to get back his wife, setting off an unbelievable sequence of double crosses and plot twists that could only come from the mind of Elmore Leonard.
Daniel Schechter’s adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s 1978 novel The Switch was the last movie with which the novelist was intimately involved, and this is an unexpectedly winning take from one of the less splashy directors to have attempted Leonard.
It gleams with a faintly tacky, country club sheen. The woman in the crispest whites is Mickey (Jennifer Aniston), playing the stoical socialite wife of fraudster Frank (Tim Robbins, sweaty and repellent). She becomes the target of an ill-planned plot by Ordell (Mos Def) and Louis (John Hawkes), who plan to kidnap her and only release her for $1m. Problem is: Frank wants her out of the picture anyway, having filed divorce papers.
About the Production
In four dozen novels and scores of short stories, Elmore Leonard has created an engrossing and often electrifying world of tough-talking career criminals, corrupt businessmen, femmes fatales and eccentric outcasts, all scheming to make that one big score. Often set in the shadowy Detroit underworld, his off-kilter tales of men and women fueled by greed and ambition have made him a beloved and bestselling author, and inspired films that include Get Shorty, Jackie Brown and Out of Sight, as well as the hit television series “Justified.”
Daniel Schechter, the director and screenwriter of the newest Leonard-inspired movie, Life of Crime, remembers his first encounter with the work of the man who has been called the “Dickens of Detroit.” “My brother had a copy of Get Shorty when I was younger,” Schechter says. “I liked the movie, so I picked it up.”
The book was what Schechter calls “a gateway drug” to his obsession with the author’s work. “I defy anyone to pick up an Elmore Leonard novel, read the first chapter, the first page, maybe even the first sentence, and try to put it down,” he says. “He’s ruined me for other writers, who, for my money, will never match his wit, his originality or his humanity. He’s been called ‘the King Daddy of crime writers’ and ‘the best writer of dialogue alive,’ two opinions I completely agree with.”
Adapting one of the internationally acclaimed author’s darkly humorous crime sagas was a long-held dream for Schechter. “I think I have read every Elmore Leonard book out there,” he says. “His books work so well cinematically because he is able to take things we’ve seen in films before-heists and robberies, in this case a kidnapping-and ground them in as much reality as possible. He makes the people feel so specific and real that the average reader or audience member is able to imagine what it would be like and how they would act in that situation.”
The Switch, the novel on which Life of Crime is based, offered all the elements the filmmaker had been looking for in a directing project. “It had seven juicy characters, a tone I thought I could nail, and it wasn’t too big in scale. I saw it as this awesome and weird meeting of Alfred Hitchcock and the Coen brothers. It was something that I couldn’t write for myself, but it had everything that I wanted to direct. It felt genuinely thrilling and savagely funny.”
Determined to make the most of Leonard’s legendary gift for spoken language, Schechter began by simply transcribing the dialogue from a single chapter and entering it verbatim into a screenplay-formatting program. “It’s amazing,” says Charles Saveur Bonan, who became an executive producer for the film. “The book almost was written like a script. That is Elmore Leonard’s distinctive writing style.”
“Just like that, I had a great scene,” Schechter says. “I decided to see what would happen if I did that to the whole book. Eight days later, after some editing and invention of my own, I had a first draft of a script.”
But what he didn’t have were the rights to film the story. The process of getting an unknown writer and director attached to an Elmore Leonard bestseller would take luck, patience, determination and a team of dedicated people, including producer Lee Stollman.
“I love Elmore Leonard’s world,” says Stollman. “I love his characters and his voice. Dan, to his credit, rolled the dice and adapted the book purely on spec, without anyone’s permission. He then sent it to Michael Siegel and Michael shared it with Elmore. And that risk paid off – Leonard said that other than Scott Frank and Quentin Tarantino, Dan’s adaptation was among the best, and gave him a free option on the book.”
Siegel, Elmore Leonard’s manager and the official guardian of his work, was so impressed by the young director’s vision and commitment that he agreed to give Schechter and Stollman time to try to assemble a cast and raise money for the movie. Working only on a handshake, the filmmakers began to put together financing, but discovered that there was one catch. No one was sure who actually owned the movie rights to The Switch.
“That started a two-year search for the owners,” says Schechter. “It was brutal. Finally we discovered that a French company had taken a 30-year option on the book. It had lapsed a year earlier.”
As the legal issues were being hammered out, Schechter continued polishing and refining his screenplay. “I didn’t work directly with Elmore in putting together the script,” he says. “He tended to keep a distance from the filmmakers who adapted his work. I’d like to think his camp saw how deeply protective I felt of the material.”
Schechter hewed closely to Leonard’s emphasis on believability, even in some of the story’s most absurd twists and turns. “I believe his genius is taking in the reader and placing them in the center of a surreal scenario and discovering how real people would handle it in a world we recognize,” he says. “As I read, I would ask myself what I would do if I were trapped in a room full of Nazi paraphernalia, or if I were trying to cheat on my wife. I find that Elmore always captures something that feels very human. Even though the book is 35 years old, the story still feels contemporary because it’s so honest and so unexpected.”
The colorful and singular aspects of the characters kept him rooting for everyone, even the seemingly irredeemable criminals behind the kidnapping. “I don’t necessarily believe that there have to be bad guys,” Schechter says. “There are people who do morally awful things in this movie, but I don’t want to demonize anybody. It’s easy to make Mickey the sympathetic housewife and Frank the abusive husband. I felt that finding moments when Mickey is more passive-aggressive makes her in part responsible for the situation, which in turn makes Frank’s unhappiness oddly sympathetic. We see that he’s sad and insecure.
“And that just makes it a more satisfying meal and a more rich film,” he says. “It’s still wildly funny and fun and you’ll want him to get his comeuppance, but when you care about him a little bit, it makes for more of a unique experience.”
If two of the main characters, car thieves-turned-kidnappers Ordell and Louis, seem familiar to moviegoers it’s because they are also central figures in Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino’s big-screen adaptation of Leonard’s bestseller Rum Punch. “People have referred to it as a prequel to Jackie Brown,” says Schechter. “It’s not really that. It just happens to have the same two characters, played in that film by Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro. I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a really appealing part of whole project, because I’m a massive fan of Jackie Brown. It accurately captured the Elmore Leonard voice and I had a big affection for those two characters.
“But when I watch this film, it doesn’t feel anything like that movie,” he continues. “It definitely has its own tone and it has a bit more action. But those are huge footsteps to have to follow in!”
Life of Crime, he says, is ultimately a story about complex people trying to make the most of a simple plan gone wrong. “It’s my love letter to the work of Elmore Leonard, which now and always will remind me that being honest and being entertaining never have to be mutually exclusive.”
Life of Crime
Directed by: Daniel Schechter
Starring: Jennifer Aniston, Mos Def, Isla Fisher, Will Forte, Clea Lewis, Tim Robbins, Alex Ladove, Jenna Nye
Screenplay by: Daniel Schechter
Production Design by: Inbal Weinberg
Cinematography by: Eric Alan Edwards
Costume Design by: Anna Terrazas
Set Decoration by: Jasmine E. Ballou
Music by: The Newton Brothers
MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexual content and violence.
Studio by: Lionsgate Films, Roadside Attractions
Release Date: August 29, 2014
Visits: 1306
