Changing Lanes
The What Ifs Redeem The If Onlys
I think about it every now and then, you do too. How did I get here? What weird concatenation of coincidence and chance caused me to end up where I am, doing what I do for a living? What unlikely set of facts and circumstances led me here, to the place that I am? And if I could never, ever have predicted that I would end up here, doing what I do here, how in the Wide World of Sports can I predict what will happen tomorrow?
I think about this almost every time I leave the office now, turning the corner to the gravel parking lot behind the building, surprised again by the strangeness of the Atlanta skyline. (The parking lot, for some perverse reason, has a far superior view than my office window.) What, I ask myself, am I doing here, in Georgia, where grits are now officially the state prepared food? Why am I in a place with four million people and four left-turn-only lanes, where the corner of Peachtree and Peachtree is not some absurdist place on a map but a real intersection? How did I get to a place that’s seven hours away from the nearest good-sized hamburger (the Whataburger in Pensacola, Florida), where free chips and salsa at Mexican restaurants are not a Constitutionally guaranteed civil right? How in the name of the designated hitter did I end up in a National League town?
(UPDATE: This gets weirder; now I live in Jersey.)
This, of course, leads us to the If Onlys. If only I’d gotten into a better college. If only I had studied a little harder in law school, or prepared better for those job interviews. If only I had worked a little harder, or been a little kinder, or prayed a little more. If only, if only, if only, forevermore.
These are the kind of regrets that you have to work through years of therapy to experience, but Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson get it all handed to them in one day. Changing Lanes is a symphony of regret, a paean to the If Only, a love song to all that could have been. It involves the lives of two busy New Yorkers that intersect back and forth over the course of a busy Good Friday.
Affleck’s day starts at a memorial service for a millionaire philantrophist who left most of his fortune in a foundation to benefit music programs for New York City schoolchildren. His second order of business is wresting control of said foundation away from the millionaire’s family and friends and into the waiting embrace of Affleck’s rapacious Wall Street law firm. To do that, he must make a court appearance downtown and file a notarized statement of the decedent’s wishes to the probate judge.
Jackson’s day starts out at a real-estate closing in Queens, he’s buying a house for his estranged family in a last-ditch attempt to keep his ex-wife from moving away to Oregon. The other half of this scheme is an appearance at a court hearing in Manhattan to stop his ex-wife from terminating the current joint-custody arrangement.
(Oddly enough, Changing Lanes is the second New York-based movie in the last three weeks — Panic Room is the other — to feature both real estate and child-custody issues. Both movies also feature the New York skyline prominently in the opening credits; Panic Room in a lush, majestic manner, Changing Lanes in a jerkier format utilizing handheld camera shots. Changing Lanes, however, shows the World Trade Center as part of its skyline panorama, and later features a heartstopping moment when New York City firemen climb up the stairs in a high-rise skyscraper. We now return you to previously-scheduled your movie review.)
So Affleck and Jackson are both striving to get to the courthouse on time, driving down the FDR at a good clip, when Affleck’s German luxury car sideswipes Jackson’s aging Toyota econobox. Jackson’s car plows into a barrier and suffers a flat tire. The two men get out of their cars, words are exchanged, and Affleck dismissively writes Jackson a blank check and drives away, leaving behind a bright-orange binder with the critical paperwork for his upcoming hearing.
Car accidents, of course, are one of the leading causes of regret in America. But here, the accident is primarily a trigger for other major regrets. Affleck’s loss of the file causes him to look stupid in court. (The judge orders Affleck — who apparently missed the day in law school when they talked about stalling for time — to find the file by the end of the day.) His real regret, though, is that the paperwork inside was ever signed in the first place, that he used a friendship to persuade a dying old man to sign paperwork that he didn’t understand in order to make his senior partner / father-in-law happy. For Jackson, the accident makes him late for his custody hearing, tying it into the regret of a failed marriage and disappointed children.
In part, the accident gives both Affleck and Johnson someone else to blame for their regrets, which is common enough:
Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doin’
And sometimes all my days are filled with rain
As I travel down life’s highway
Things ain’t goin’ my way
‘Cause there’s always someone swervin’ in my lane– Robert Earl Keen
Jackson blames Affleck for making him miss the hearing and losing joint custody, and refuses to tell Affleck where the file is. Affleck turns his misdirected anger toward Jackson, and takes extreme steps to get his file back. I will not tell you more of what transpires; the trailers (as they tend to do) already give away much too much as it is.
I will say that what follows is a gut-wrenching parade of ethical conflicts that, in their way, are just as chilling as anything you’ll see in this summer’s action blockbusters. Even a small scene, where Affleck and his partners calmly discuss possible strategies for dealing with the loss of the file, is fraught with tension and suspense. Changing Lanes is that rare species, a moral thriller, and is probably the best one in the last twenty years that doesn’t have Gene Hackman as part of the cast. (Sydney Pollack plays the Gene Hackman character and does a teriffic job.)
Changing Lanes is a fine film, a far cry from your standard cookie-cutter revenge flick. It has two excellent, humanistic lead performances by actors that are actually expressing genuine human emotions like confusion, anger and despair. But its real genius is its recognition that the What Ifs redeem the If Onlys. To paraphrase the great and good Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal, the What Ifs encompass all of the positive things that we do, all the things that never would have happened if we hadn’t been here to do them. What if I hadn’t finished law school, or didn’t work so hard to pass the bar? What if I’d never taken that internship in college, and never met all those people that helped me get that job in Austin? What if I never saw The Princess Bride or read Memoir from Antproof Case or asked that girl in the office next door out for lunch?
Changing Lanes has its own set of What Ifs and If Onlys, but comes to the same conclusion, and ultimately, the same redemption. It is a thought-provoking journey through a swiftly-changing moral landscape that is eminently worth your time.