Saturday Night At The Movies
Whoa, Lopakhin!
By Dennis Hartley
Keanu really digs the theatre: Henry’s Crime
Keanu Reeves does Chekhov? No, I’m not pitching an idea for an SNL sketch. After all, he has done Shakespeare (he co-starred in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing 
One assumes that Henry (Reeves) has some kind of inner life. He seems to be a likable, easy-going fellow; it’s just that he’s a bit…inscrutable. Maybe it’s his job. Working the graveyard shift night after night at a N.Y. Thruway tollbooth would put anybody in semi-comatose state. Nothing fazes the agreeable yet impassive Henry, one way or the other-although he does display a slight twitch when, one morning at breakfast, his wife (Judy Greer) broaches the subject of the couple having a child. Suddenly, we get the impression that Henry would prefer to be anywhere else but there, at that moment, having that particular conversation. What’s going on? Is this a troubled marriage? Does he love his wife? Is this cipher of a man internally harboring primal doubts about life itself? Or…is he suffering in silence from a sudden attack of gas? There’s really no way of discerning.
We never get a chance to find out exactly what Henry is contemplating, because that is precisely the moment that Fate intervenes. An old high school chum named Eddie Vibes (Fisher Stevens) unexpectedly shows up on his doorstep, with a drunken cohort in tow. Both men are dubiously outfitted for a game of baseball. Eddie wants to know if Henry can give them a ride to their “game”. Nothing about this questionable early-morning scenario seems to raise any red flags for the ever-malleable Henry. Even Eddie’s request to stop at the bank “on the way”-and to park the car out front and wait while his passengers go inside-fails to elicit the tiniest raised eyebrow from Henry. Needless to say, the heist goes awry, Henry’s car stalls, his “friends” flee…and guess who ends up in stir?
Although he owes them squat, Henry doesn’t rat out the real culprits and takes the fall, while his demeanor remains unchanged. At this point, one might surmise that Henry is either some kind of transcendent Zen master…or a clueless moron (not unlike the protagonist of Forrest Gump 
Henry gets out of the pen, discovers that his wife has remarried to one of the creeps who set him up (he almost seems secretly relieved-in his own inimitable fashion) and proceeds to foment a plan to rob the bank that he originally had no intention of robbing in the first place. While casing the scene, he is hit by a car driven by a harried stage actress (Vera Farmiga) who is running late for a rehearsal at a nearby theater (it’s a Meet Cute). Soon afterwards, he discovers an old newspaper clipping about a long-forgotten bootlegger’s tunnel that runs under the alley that separates the theater from the bank next door. He encourages a reluctant Max to make nice to his parole board at his next hearing, so he can assist him with the heist. It doesn’t take the seasoned con man too long to figure out that the key to gaining access to the bank is for the heist team to finagle themselves into the theater production in the building next door. Hence, we get to the part where Keanu does Chekhov. One slight complication: he falls in love with his leading lady (who wouldn’t?).
There’s a little déjà vu running through this film (the second effort from 44 Inch Chest
