Welcome to Collinwood

'Welcome to Collinwood', produced by Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney, is the low-rent flipside of their earlier collaboration 'Ocean's Eleven' in which a sophisticated crew of professional criminals in Las Vegas breathlessly carries off the perfect crime. For 'Welcome to Collinwood' is set in the decidedly unglamorous neighbourhood of Collinwood, and is the tale of a ragtag alliance of losers who plan an apparently straightforward heist with horrible, hilarious results.

From 'Take the Money and Run', 'Crackers', and 'Quick Change' to 'Palookaville' and 'Small-Time Crooks', the crime-gone-wrong comedy allows viewers to laugh at the main characters' bunglings while sympathising with their sheer bad luck. The grand masters of this sub-genre are the Coen brothers ('Blood Simple', 'Raising Arizona', 'Fargo', 'The Big Lebowski'), and their influence can be felt upon both the dialogue and characterisation in 'Welcome to Collinwood'. For the script of writers/directors Anthony and Joe Russo is liberally peppered with a stylised thieves' cant, producing inimitable lines like 'this bellini is starting to look like a real fucking kaputchnik'; and its characters are a collection of grotesque lowlife oddballs, whose every blemish is unflatteringly magnified by the camera.

The cast is like a who's who of independent cinema: Sam Rockwell as Pero, a romantic boxer who is always punching above his weight; Luis Guzman putting in an all-too believable performance as ill-fated car thief Cosimo, 'the biggest asshole in Collinwood'; William H. Macy as neurotic, baby-toting Riley, desperate to get his wife out of prison; Michael Jeter as bumbling, acrophobic widower Toto; George Clooney as Jerzy, the tattooed, wheelchair-bound tutor in burglary; and Isaiah Washington as the over-groomed Leon, whose cravats, pipes, kerchiefs and smoking jackets conceal his dream of a country life spent reading the papers in his underwear. All are absurd in themselves, and even funnier in their ensemble interactions.

'Welcome to Collingwood' IS very funny, but it is also somethig more than just a lightweight farce. What at first seems to be merely an entertaining portrait of gross incompetence and stupidity turns out to be cloaking a more serious depiction of the hopelessness engendered by the poverty trap. Collinwood, 'the Beirut of Cleveland', is shown to be a place where having a job as a salesman, or even in the nickel factory, means that you have made it big; where even nuns act as local usurers; where a new mother is imprisoned for an entire year because she can't afford a thousand dollar fine; and where $300,000 split four ways seems like all the money in the world. In other words, once one sees past the laughs, this film of shabby dreams and impossible hopes is tinged with real bitterness.

Much easier to get into than a safe, but every bit as rewarding.

Anton Bitel, 24.04.03