Day of reckoning
A tale of redemption" is a phrase that film critics like to toss around. It usually makes some sense, since most dramas have at least one character who realizes the error of his or her ways and tries to do something about it before the curtain falls--a sort of low-rent form of redemption.
High-end redemption is harder to come by in contemporary American cinema. (It used to be a real crowd-pleaser, back in the silent days of D. W. Griffith [Intolerance] and Erich von Stroheim [Greed], and in the populist tales of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. After that, the theme was mostly left to foreign directors such as Ingmar Bergman and Krzysztof Kieslowski.) But Roger Michell's Changing Lanes is a big-budget movie about redemption, and it treats the theme with surprising grace and intelligence.
The story, which plays out on a wet and gloomy Good Friday in Manhattan, concerns the moral travails of two men who would appear to have little in common: Gavin Banek (Ben Affleck), a rich young Wall Street attorney who is at the center of a shady attempt to fleece a wealthy charitable organization, and Doyle Gipson (Samuel L. Jackson), an insurance salesman and recovering alcoholic who is trying to keep his wife from taking his two sons to Oregon. They are both headed to court at the same time when they crash on the FDR highway. Doyle wants to deal with the accident by the book, since he has already cut too many corners in his life, but Gavin has no time for such annoyances. Slapping a blank check in Doyle's hands, he darts off to court, leaving Doyle standing there in the rain. "Better luck next time" is his mocking farewell.
