Tribeca Review: Carrie Coon & Shea Whigham Make Neo-Noir Magic In 'Lake George'

By Jason Adams | Film | June 19, 2024 |

By Jason Adams | Film | June 19, 2024 |

Sometimes all you need to reinvigorate a well-worn genre is the simplest of ideas—namely you wrench the stock characters out from the land of cliche where they have wandered, and you find ways to make them feel fully fleshed out and human again. Paying attention to character! Imagine such a thing in this world. And then, voila, suddenly we care again. And that’s just what director Jeffrey Reiner manages to do with Lake George, his understated and fairly wonderful new Neo-noir starring the killer two-some of Shea Whigham and Carrie Coon—they act, we care. It’s magic.

Admittedly, when you’re blessed with those two stellar leads, you’re already three-quarters of the way to heaven. But Lake George fully commits to its fresh tune while letting those two do what they do best, and a richer, funnier, and lovelier movie is gifted to us watching because of it. Inhabiting the stock Noir roles of “the patsy” and “the femme fatale,” Whigham and Coon give us a patsy and a femme like we’ve never quite watched before—better, weirder people, confounding the old archetypes and along with them our expectations, ultimately making this a cinematic trip worth its weight in gold bars.

And gold bars are just the engine driving this criss-crossed double and triple-crosser, although Don (Whigham) doesn’t quite know that at film’s start. A former insurance man whose nasty gambling habit got him mixed up with some very bad people, we meet him as he’s being unloaded from a ten-year prison sentence. The only souvenir he carries with him from that lost decade is an arm that doesn’t work anymore, hanging down dead at his side as an ever-present reminder. All Don wants to do now that he’s free is retire to a cabin on a lake in Northern California (I’ll let you guess the lake’s name)—how he gets to there though is, for the time being, a mystery to him.

Because it takes Don about two minutes of screentime to run through all of his on-the-up opportunities. He tries applying for jobs that won’t have him, and he tries asking for help from old acquaintances that won’t have him either. And he takes a moment to sadly spy on the wife and kids who left him once he turned out to be such a disaster. All dead ends. So Don finds himself forced, to his clear chagrin, to go see the gangster who got him tossed in the can in the first place.

That man’s name is Armin (Glenn Fleshler), a behemoth who struts across his tacky nouveau-riche mansion in gaudy Versace silks, with a glowering, slightly tackier thug called Harout (Max Casella) always at his side. Don thinks Armin owes him the money he never got paid for the job he got caught for. Armin, to put it mildly, doesn’t quite see it that way. But Armin is nevertheless oh let’s say amused by Don’s gumption, showing up on his doorstep after fucking up so royally. One man’s gumption is just another man’s exhaustion—Don just has nothing to lose. And whaddya know—Armin just happens to have a job for somebody just like that.

Because it turns out that Armin’s gone and gotten himself mixed up with a busybody gal Friday named Phyllis (Coon), whose reach has as of late far exceeded her grasp. It all started out well—they met in rehab, she was great with numbers, and they got on like gangbusters. But Phyllis got too entrenched, Armin explains—she’s got her manicured fingers into everything, and it’s never enough for her. But worse than that, Armin no longer trusts her. She’s simply gotta go. Like… go go. And get dead, you see.

Don, it’s clear to everyone in that room and everyone watching the screen as well as it is to Don himself, is not the kind of man for that kind of job. But that’s what makes him perfect, Armin argues. Swiping a page from Strangers on a Train, Armin says he needs somebody to off Phyllis with no motive, no connection. And Armin won’t be taking no for an answer. Don even tries to do just that. But once that question’s been let out of the box, there’s no stuffing it back in—not until Phyllis is stiff on ice.

Of course laid plans in Noirs are made for exploding, and sure enough Don’s exercise in amateur assassination doesn’t quite fall into line the way everybody’s intending. Killing’s just not quite one of his character quirks, it turns out. And as he watches Phyllis lovingly attend to her elderly mother in a nursing home, you can sense he’s not quite buying Armin’s description of this woman as evil incarnate. Armin, it would appear, has been an unreliable narrator.

Or has he? As Don and Phyllis do meet (but not “meet cute” so much) and as they become acquainted with one another, Lake George flirts with the time-honored tradition of upending allegiances—are people who they say they are? Or is something more complicated roiling about within us? Lake George falls as it must firmly in the latter camp (it would be an awfully boring plot if it didn’t) but the chemistry Whigham and Coon brew up together is so charming that they make us lose all sight of where they, and we, are possibly probably heading anyway. We’re simply having such a nice time with these two that the plot trots secondary to watching Coon (truly wonderful here) trying to crack a smirk out of Whigham, and succeeding.

So as a road-trip movie coasting on these two actors’ plentiful charms, Lake George makes for a lovely ride. It feels traditional in the right ways, with its simple, sharp focus on character and performance—no it doesn’t have a lot of surprises up its sleeves, but it rolls along steady, funny, and true thanks to Whigham and Coon and all of the room it allows them to breathe, and to fill up. There’s as much melancholy here as there is humor; there’s a good dose of gratuitous violence; there’s Carrie motherfucking Coon wielding a paint can like Macaulay Culkin gone bonkers. Lake George is just a good old-fashioned time at the movies.