Keanu Reeves is an actor that people either seem to love or hate. Those that love him think of him as Neo in THE MATRIX films. Those that hate him think he’s little more than bumbler Ted from the BILL AND TED movies. The fact is he’s both and so much more. He’s an actor who has good and bad moments like everyone else in the world. And in HENRY’S CRIME he displays what would appear on the surface to be a wooden character but who is actually a man who never quite came alive.
Henry Torne is in a rut. He works as a toll booth collector and goes through his day to day existence with no life to his life. When his wife (Judy Greer) talks about having children he doesn’t even get excited about that. But his life changes.
Asked by a friend to drive them to participate in a baseball game, Henry unwittingly finds himself the driver of a getaway car for a bank robbery. Left behind, he’s arrested and sentenced to prison, never giving up the names of those who were with him.
Henry’s cell mate is a long time prisoner named Max Saltzman (James Caan). A confidence man who’s been in prison for years, Max is content with the system, it works for him. He talks to Henry about finding your goal in life, living up to your potential, and then trying to make it happen. For him, that’s prison.
During a discussion between prisoners Henry finds his mission in life. He’s in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. That being the case he twists things backwards. He’s done the time, now he needs to do the crime.
After his release Henry stands outside of the bank he was arrested in front of. Stepping into the street he’s hit by a car driven by Julie Ivanova (Vera Farmiga). Julie makes sure he’s okay, takes him to a small coffee shop across the street and leaves him to get to work. It’s in the bathroom Henry finds his mission when he sees an old front page of the local newspaper from decades ago describing a tunnel between the bank and the theater across the street.
Visiting the theater, Henry finds Julie involved in the play THE ORCHARD TREE being performed there. They talk and he looks around the building, realizing that perhaps the tunnel still exists. Visiting Max in prison, he asks for his help which means Max getting out. Max follows through, looks over the job and things move forward.
Various other criminals get involved in the whole story and Henry begins dating Julie. For once he seems to have something in his life that makes him want to move forward, to wake up in the morning. But once the crime is finished, he leaves Julie behind and moves on. Is it the crime that is the focus of Henry’s life now? Or is it Julie?
Reeves performance is one that is unusual at best. Henry is a stoic individual who rarely if ever displays emotion. It is only on stage while performing with Julie that he shows anything at all. But that’s the character Reeves is playing here. A man dead to the world who had no clue how to let lose, how to expose himself to anyone. And when he does, he does so on his terms, displaying nothing on his face but plenty in his actions and words.
The entire cast does an excellent job as well, supporting Reeves character while establishing their own at the same time. Particularly interesting was watching Caan as Max and thinking back to his 1981 film THIEF where he plays a bank robbing thief as well. It might make an interesting double feature at home one night.
The nice thing about this film is that it has a feel good sense about it without getting mushy. You want Henry to find life, you want him to find something, anything, that will wake him up and make him get out into the world. And by the end of the film you realize that perhaps he just might make it after all.
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