Uniforms
From left, Chris Evans, Bel Powley, Michael Cera and Brian Tyree Henry in "Lobby Hero."
NOTHING VERY DRAMATIC EVER happens in the lobbies I pass through regularly. Sometimes the doorman (or, if he's away from his desk, one of the building porters) tells me I have a package or asks if I need a taxi. At my doctor's office near Columbus Circle, I hear the security guard telling the end of a story that prompts his visitor to remark, "That's loan-sharking." Once, in the New York Times lobby, I brought my dog in -- to meet a colleague who was working a late shift and had offered to give us a ride to the country -- and ended up disagreeing with a security guard, somewhat profanely, about exactly where the dog ought to wait. But mostly I just come and go.
So I looked forward to seeing "Lobby Hero." Kenneth Lonergan's 2001 Off Broadway hit, now making its Broadway debut, because I knew there would be considerable drama, A lot happens in the middle-income New York high-rise apartment building lobby that is the play's setting, and almost none of it needs to. The trouble is, people are stupid.
"Nobody loves a loser the way Mr. Lonergan does," Ben Brantley wrote in his 2001 New York Times review of "Lobby Hero" and its Off Broadway opening.
Don't tell Lonergan that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. His characters know better. In the world they live in, bad things happen and damage is done, and nothing is ennobling about the scars. Lonergan doesn't propose a world like Neil LaBute's, thank God. In LaBute's work, going back to "In the Company of Men," venomous people walk the earth and find their deepest pleasure in making things horrible or at least humiliating for someone else. In Lonergan's, there's no need for villains; we are all our own worst enemies.
Tough Guys
In "Lobby Hero," Chris Evans, left, plays a police officer who values loyalty over justice. Michael Cera plays a security guard who talks too much.
In "Lobby Hero," the clear bad guy is Bill (played by the movie superhero Chris Evans), a pompous police officer who takes sexual advantage of his pretty young partner, shamelessly lies to her about his feelings and then keeps her waiting while he dashes upstairs, in the middle of his shift, to Apt. 22J to spend some quality time naked with a tenant who rents by the hour.
The good guy is William (Brian Tyree Henry), a security guard supervisor who has always worked hard, shown up on time and gone by the rules. But when he learns that his brother, a less upstanding type, may have been involved in a violent crime, he does something stupid. But only because he had to be loyal to his brother. And because what black man gets a fair trial these days?
The classic screw-up is Jeff (Michael Cera, who also starred in the recent revival of Lonergan's "This Is Our Youth"). In his 20s, he's already failed his father by being thrown out of the Navy and is living in a rented room in a relative's house. He does something stupid too -- because he really feels compelled to be a person of integrity. Or is it to impress a woman?
Dawn (Bel Poelry), Bill's uncertain partner, who has been on the police force for only three months, seems harmless and well meaning (except toward the guy she attacked in self-defense, maybe, who is going to lose an eye). But she makes promises and doesn't keep them, and her actions reveal that she relishes a moment of sweet revenge against Bill so much that she can't help taking an action that will seriously hurt all three men, to varying degrees.
Best
Kenneth Lonergan with his Oscar for the screenplay of "Manchester by the Sea."
And here's the shocker about "Lobby Hero": Nobody has an emotional epiphany. Nobody turns over a new leaf. Life just goes on, as messily as ever. In fact, that sort of thing is a pet peeve of Lonergan's.
What does he want to see the end of? "The personal growth required for every major American film, from every major studio," he said in an after-lecture Q&A in London. "It just makes you just want to kill yourself,” Lonergan is the kind of man who talks like that, the kind of man who rubs his eyes while being interviewed, scratches his face in the middle of giving a speech and believes that becoming a better human being isn't the only desirable goal in life.
“Captain America has to have a moment of personal growth or it’s no good,” he said, describing current thinking in Hollywood. "I want to see Captain America throw his shield" at people and hurt them.
Support System
Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo in "You Can Count on Me."
Lonergan's characters were like this from the beginning. In his first movie hit, "You Can Count on Me," about an adult sister and brother (Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo), the whole point of the story is that neither of them can. Count on each other. But sometimes a generally worthless guy does something good.
"This is not a movie about people solving things," the critic Roger Ebert wrote. "This is a movie about people living day to day with their plans, fears and desires." They don't triumph; they "bumble hopefully into the future."
The same thing is true of Casey Affleck's character in "Manchester by the Sea," for which Lonergan won a best-screenplay Oscar. A.O. Scott of The Times praised the filmmaker for being "after a kind of realism rarely found in recent American movies."
Trauma
Casey Affleck in "Manchester by the Sea."
The protagonist of "Manchester" is an alcoholic, alone, morose and stuck in a dead-end job. When he's called on to care for a nephew who's been orphaned, he rises to the occasion, but only partly and only for a while. What? He can't get over the death of his children in a house fire that was his fault?
That's understandable and sympathetic, Lonergan's film says. For a man like this, maybe it's heroic just to get out of bed every morning. In the end, even the worst character in "Lobby Hero" has some admirable traits, like standing by your friends and colleagues, "no matter what." That probably shouldn't outweigh a basic principle like justice, but to Bill it does. In "Lobby Hero," even if no one's character is transformed by crisis, everyone still has a soul.
