Where has Los Angeles gone? Right where we left it. But at the movies? It’s become an unfriendly place to stage a film. Union fees are high. It’s hard to shut down locations you’d want to use. Other markets offer tax incentives to film there instead. And so, we’ve wound up with a placeless filmography for a whole generation of movies. Other cities now play the cities where you’d want to shoot. The specificity of a place has been vanquished due to cost-cutting measures. Most movies, now, feel like they could happen anywhere.
So, it’s especially joyous when a movie is cemented by its sense of place. The facts of Crime 101 are the facts of California and U.S. Route 101, the scenic artery that connects the West Coast, offering some of the country’s most scenic drives, and most importantly for our purposes, offering a route into and out of Los Angeles.
Los Angeles plays itself in Crime 101. Los Angeles remains one of the most character-rich cities in the world. Drone shots hover above U.S. Route 101, as the camera spins, moves with traffic, which it captures as though in a feverish trance. The film is shot by Erik Wilson (who shot all 3 Paddington films), and is the primary feature of the movie. The framing exhibits the 101 as setting, theme & motif, and character, and it’s always alluring, whether it’s the lights of passing cars gleaming off reflective skyscrapers, or something as normal as a congestion of cars, now rendered as artful poetry. It’s not what you shoot but how you shoot it.
Crime 101 is California pretty but also an exhibition of direct control in its filmmaking. Bart Layton (American Animals, 2018), directs and writes (alongside co-writer and crime fiction stalwart Don Winslow (Savages, 2010)), and with exacting acumen for exactly this sort of thing, the filmmaking team showcase such a sharp control for the material and tone of the piece. This doesn’t mean that the work is always in control, in fact, it’s when it spirals out the hardest, where we understand that the filmmakers have done something more special.
The film surrounds the one-last-crime of Chris Hemsworth’s jewel thief, who is principled, and shows deep control and consideration for his heists. The processes are important and Crime 101 is a process movie about crime. Not all jewel thieves are built the same. Barry Keoghan plays a biker who spirals out into random acts of violence and chaos during his thefts. This contrast is also implied within the filmmaking, which captures a totally different sort of tonality, depending on which character is centered when. To catch a jewel thief, as the old movie trailer chestnut goes, you must become a jewel thief. And so, Crime 101 is also a crash-course in criminal psychology, where Mark Ruffalo plays the kind of cop he always plays, and he’s so good at that. Halle Berry, then, plays into the neo-noir tradition of the disillusioned femme fatale, who finds out about love and betrayal the hard way.
There’s some honor among thieves. They must follow a basic code. That’s what Crime 101 lays out, playing out as a tone poem of modern Los Angeles, wrapped in a modernization of 1995’s Heat without simply replaying that film’s distinct beats. It all works. It works because it understands the importance of place in film and that if the place embodies something of the character of the story, that so much can be extracted from a place that has been filmed so much in its history and development but has not been given the same attention, perhaps because of its over-documentation. Sometimes it’s important to return and find out that all the same attributes of a place are still inherent in its character and that Los Angeles, ultimately, is still the best option. Los Angeles plays itself.