Changing Lanes

Another one for the road

You just never know with some movies. Here is what looks like some standard Hollywood product with two stars who've been overexposed to the point of boredom, from a director previously untried in the US, in a story that sounds like it was worked out on the back of an envelope. Yet Changing Lanes, against the odds, turns out to be a good, tightly wound moral drama that, until an unfortunate sideways skid in the final stretch, actually goes somewhere. It is one of those strange films that manages to be both contrived yet grippingly realistic, and you'd happily dodge through traffic to keep up with it.

It begins with two New Yorkers in a minor collision on FDR Drive. Ordinarily it wouldn't be a problem, but this morning both of them have urgent business in court, and one of them commits a fatal indiscretion. Gavin Banek (Ben Affleck) is a brash Wall Street attorney on his way to clinch a multi-million dollar charity foundation set-up by a late philanthropist; he hasn't time to swap details with stressed insurance salesman Doyle Gipson (Samuel L Jackson), who also needs to be in court to plead for joint custody of his two children, and so, Master of the Universe that he is, Gavin offers Doyle a blank cheque. He refuses this sop, so Gavin drives off, calling "better luck next time" over his shoulder. By the end of the day, he'll wish he hadn't done that.

Doyle, arriving too late for his custody hearing, is incandescent, and decides to get some payback. He has the means too, because Gavin mislaid a vital piece of court paperwork at the scene of the accident, and Doyle won't let him have it back. This could be the premise for a comedy, indeed it slightly recalls the fender-bender incident that had Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito at one another's throats in Tin Men. Instead, Changing Lanes initiates a tit-for-tat cycle of revenge that quickly escalates from unpleasant to life-threatening, with the audience operating as an appalled sort of referee.

The film makes it difficult to decide conclusively in either's favour, because the screenplay (by Chap Taylor and Michael Tolkin) makes a point of rendering them both believably flawed and believably decent. Doyle's back story is that of a recovering alcoholic who's determined to halt his slide into rage and self-pity (though his sponsor at Alcoholics Anonymous is William Hurt, surely a burden no man deserves); in squarish spectacles and mac, Jackson is quieter and sadder here, yet he is also capable of losing it when he is provoked – there's no talk of biblical vengeance, but a computer terminal does get flung at a plate-glass window.

As for Gavin, he initially seems kin of those yuppies who were always getting their comeuppance in Eighties movies: he's just been made partner, and he's married to the boss's daughter. Success has gone to his head, and encouraged him to believe that his time is more precious than the ordinary joe's. The brush-off he gives Doyle feels characteristic, yet beneath his professional self-importance one detects a nervous reflex of shame, and an urge to make amends.

Affleck, whose own brand of flash has been less than endearing of late, here digs a little deeper into the role, and suggests how even an attorney might come to recognise the value of integrity. And he manages a moment of true revelation when his wife (Amanda Peet) explains to him what sort of man she hoped she was marrying (an unscrupulous bastard, in short). Peet's is one of several smaller roles that give Changing Lanes vital shading.

As Gavin's colleague and conscience, Toni Collette, hangs around the edges of the movie very effectively, as does Sydney Pollack as his father-in-law, who does a fine little sketch of the movie's larger prospect: a mask of civility suddenly slipping to reveal human nature with its teeth bared. Kim Staunton as Doyle's wife makes us feel the weariness of a woman who has stuck by a difficult, volatile man for too long.

Best of all, in a role lasting about three minutes, is Dylan Baker as a computer hacker whom Gavin pays to nobble Doyle's credit ratings – to bankrupt him, in effect. Baker, who played the paedophile father in Happiness, does little more than flash a smile as insincere as a Hallowe'en pumpkin, but his sinister amiability lights up the picture quite beautifully. Credit here to British director Roger Michell, who's plainly a dab hand at coaxing the best from actors: his BBC film of Persuasion was by far the best of the Nineties Austen adaptations.

Roger Michell stated in an interview recently that Changing Lanes was his attempt to sneak an art-house film into the multiplexes. Well, let's not get carried away: for a start, no self-respecting art-house film would betray the edgy mood it has cultivated with such a sappy, feelgood conclusion. Changing Lanes, so honest about the way resentment can make monsters of us, really needs a resolution to chime with that bleak view. Is it possible that the film-makers originally planned such a resolution, found test audiences disliked it, and so instead coddled us with the blanket of "closure"?

It is a pity, if so, because in other ways the script refuses the obvious moves. Class and race, for example, are felt as differences throughout the film, yet neither is introduced as a leg-up to the moral high-ground. Changing Lanes isn't a great picture, and may lose your goodwill before the end, but it's often exciting, it is superbly acted, and it has interesting things to say about living in a big city – and about the importance of a small courtesy.