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Welcome
to Collinwood
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This American film – one of several small projects that has benefited from the sponsorship of Steven Soderbergh – sat on the shelf for a while in Australia. It is not hard to see why, for this is the kind of modest movie that only does well if slipped judiciously in-between other, bigger titles featuring the same actors. It is a heist film about losers – and thus the flip side of the remake of The Italian Job (2003) – which loosely reworks the beloved Italian comedy Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958). The cast mingles character actors (such as Patricia Clarkson, Luis Guzman, William H. Macy and Sam Rockwell) who enjoy their detailed, naturalistic work, with a cameo from a star (George Clooney) playing against type as a safecracking expert confined to a wheelchair. The writer-director team of Joe and Anthony Russo labour hard to make sure the tone is whimsical, comic and just a little bit sad. There is a song from Paolo Conte and a score by Mark Mothersbaugh, scenes where these small-time crooks nurse babies or argue about amateur cinematography, details of mundane life in Cleveland, and many moments where the characters fleetingly express their thwarted dreams and ambitions. Everything is in its rightful place here, just a little too cleanly so. It has the feel of a by-the-numbers exercise, a calculated-to-please mixture of genre elements with neo-realist art-film respectability. © Adrian Martin August 2003 |
