Premiering at the 25th Tribeca Film Festival, the small-scale crime thriller, Crooks, clocks in at just under eighty minutes as it follows two women stuck in time: Faye and Blanche. A washed-up singer who has resorted to crime, Faye (Angela Trimbur) goes in for one more job that will get her the money she needs to get back on her feet. On the lam, Faye stumbles into Big Ed’s, a deserted diner run by a waifish waitress, Blanche (Melora Walters). A magnificent scene that rightfully commands a quarter of the film’s runtime, Faye and Blanche may have both finally met their match. Like a cracked mirror, the two women pick at each other’s crooked corners until the illusion is broken. For the diner scene alone, Crooks is a fascinating watch, where Trimbur and Walters let it all hang out and dangle in a dazzling display of the abandoned American dream.
A small-potatoes story looking to make a mean stew, writer-director Mickey Keating lets Crooks cook on low heat until cranking up the tension in the second act. Opening on Faye in a jazz club, she runs off the stage after being heckled by drunk men. Her former partner finds her to let her in on an upcoming stick-up at a high-stakes poker game. While Faye’s past is never quite revealed, we gather that she was once a promising singer, but is now more defined by her criminal past. Never connecting all the dots completely, it’s difficult to see through Faye’s extra-hard exterior. Luckily, just when the plot feels it may have been left on simmer a second too long, Crooks starts boiling back up about halfway through the film, when the two women finally meet.
Trimbur brings a frenetic energy to Crooks. As she peruses dimly lit speakeasies and poker rooms of Chicago, there’s a toughness to her performance that infuses the film with pulpy gangster panache. Accompanied by Trimbur’s signature bob and Faye’s sharp suits, the character’s severe swagger can overshadow the emotional beats. While we should care about her current lover, former lover, and past wrongdoers, that investment never comes to fruition in our time with Faye. While the character falls a bit flat, Trimbur never does.
After a staccato string of scenes featuring stifling violence, Melora Walters’ bumbling about in a quiet diner is like a cool glass of water in the Illinois summer heat. Walters’ performance is simultaneously comforting and discomfiting, one of the actress’s singular feats we’ve seen in her previous work, such as Magnolia (1999). There’s a warm femininity to her smile, but a melancholic sadness behind her eyes. As soon as Faye walks into Big Ed’s, it’s apparent that something is askew with its lone waitress, Blanche.
Against the backdrop of stale diner coffee, Faye’s bag full of stolen cash, and Blanche’s only companion, a jukebox, the two women dance around each other’s true intentions. Blanche swears she recognizes Faye as some sort of star, since she had spent time in Hollywood herself trying to make it big before getting into trouble with the law. Sound familiar? It becomes eerily apparent these two women have more in common than they realize, like the only thing that separates them is some twenty-odd years.
Embodying these two women as wholly different, yet cut from the same crooked cloth, Walters and Trimbur breathe life into a sometimes stale story. Crooks would have benefited from fleshing out this particular storyline and leaving the carousel of macho gangsters on the cutting-room floor. Still, the thing has legs. Keating carefully plucks the plot out from the underbelly of Chicago and into the broad, blinding daylight of a Midwestern wasteland — where it’s hard to invade, as Faye quickly learns, and even harder to escape, as Blanche knows all too well. Keating’s intentional shifts in setting, style, and perspective expertly capture the timeless conflict of chasing your dreams so desperately until they chase you.
Review Courtesy of Kasey Dunifer
Feature Image Courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival