Kirby helps helps light up an unbelievable ‘Night’
There’s a lot of currency, as in topical, and currency, as in cash, at the heart of “Night Always Comes,” the kinetic Netflix thriller featuring a fabulous turn by Vanessa Kirby as a destitute woman who becomes a criminal, literally overnight, in her attempt to claim her piece of the American dream.
Based on the best-selling novel by Willy Vlautin, the movie is a microcosm of today’s zeitgeist, touching on everything from the escalating housing crisis to income disparity to Jeffrey Epstein. But it’s the quality most lacking that ultimately defines it. And that would be plausibility. Director Benjamin Caron (“Andor”) consistently laughs in the face of realism, sending Kirby on a preposterous 16-hour odyssey in which her Lynette turns tricks, steals cars, cracks safes, throttles thugs and deals drugs – all for the sake of her own justice. WTF?
Yet, Kirby renders Lynette so fearless and compelling that you’ve no choice but to defy your better judgment and ride along. Just expect to be doing a lot of eye-rolling accompanied by incredulous exclamations of “c’mon!” Yes, Kirby has game, but Caron has no shame. Neither does Sarah Conradt, whose adaptation of Vlautin’s novel is nothing but episodic nonsense.
It begins OK, as Lynette and her older, Down syndrome brother, Kenny (Zack Gottsagen, the breakout star from “The Peanut Butter Falcon”), embark on a new day as the radio blares sobering news: wages are falling, inflation is rising and homelessness is but one missed paycheck away. Undaunted, Lynette soldiers on with a hint of a smile because today is the day she will close on a house that will become a real home for her, Kenny and their mother, Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh). All Mom needs to do is stop by the bank and pick up a cashier’s check for the $25,000 down payment on her way to the realtor’s office. But Doreen never shows. To Lynette’s dismay, she soon learns Mom has impulsively opted to squander the dough on a brand-new Mazda.
You laugh at the absurdity of the situation. But not Lynette, she instinctively turns to Plan B, which begins with her shagging a wealthy businessman (Randall Park) whom she considers a well-paying friend with benefits. She asks him for the $25 grand, but he’s only willing to front the $1,000 he leaves behind on the hotel nightstand. But wait, alongside the cash, he’s also accidentally left the key fob to his wife’s $100,000 Mercedes SL.
Lynette doesn’t think twice about pinching it. And with that, we’re off on a wild ride through some of Portland’s seediest neighborhoods, with Lynette’s co-worker from down at the bakery, Cody (Stephan James), riding shotgun as they recklessly commit one felony after another. My favorite bit is them lugging a heavy safe from a high-rise condo and loading it into a car unnoticed.
That preposterousness will seem minor once Lynette finds herself back inside the hedonistic lair of Eli Roth’s Blake, the Jeffrey Epstein of the piece, a perv who used to trick Lynette into having sex with him when she was 16. Roth is authentically creepy and representative of the high-quality performances on display. But the movie is just too over the top to in any way benefit from them.
I love the ending, though. It’s the perfect coda to reflect our “can’t win” times, when billionaires are the only benefactors in a hopelessly rigged economy. But it doesn’t have nearly the impact it should because, in keeping with its dumb title, “Night Always Comes” is a dumb movie that can’t seem to decide if it wants to be a satire or a wake-up call. Spoiler alert: it’s neither.
It’s just a feeble bid for relevancy, a film that ironically was bought, paid for and stars folks who probably have no idea about what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck. But they’re not above capitalizing on the misfortunes of the people they are allegedly championing. Not when they’re looking down from the safety of their reinforced ivory towers. For them, “night” seldom, if ever, comes.
Movie review
Night Always Comes
Rated: R for language throughout, some sexual content, drug content, violence
Cast: Vanessa Kirby, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Zack Gottsagen, Stephan James, Eli Roth and Randall Park
Director: Benjamin Caron
Writer: Sarah Conradt
Runtime: 110 minutes
Where: In theaters Aug. 15 (limited) and on Netflix the same day
Grade: C-
