He’s Come Undone

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The New York Sun

When it comes to the modern crime film (“neo-noir,” if you must), scoring the conceptual ball between the two opposite goal posts of style and substance is a difficult play for directors to make. Style is relatively easy. The look of smoke-filled bars and the sound of downbeat self-aware dialogue curling out of the scowling mouths of tough guys and femme fatales is apparently its own reward for many latter-day crime movie creators.

But substance — fashioning characters who can translate their interior landscapes to an audience on a gut level rather than just as genre connect-the-dots spectacle — that’s another story. With its Asian-American milieu, clipped crime-speak, and omnipresent shadows, “Undoing,” a new film written and directed by Chris Chan Lee, evokes its share of familiar modern dress noir elements. But “Undoing,” which makes its premiere today at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, is also a film of discrete sensitivity and unusual emotional intelligence.
“You create the situation, you don’t walk into it,” observes the film’s moral compass, a world-weary, philosophical retired Los Angeles gangster named Don (played by the excellent character actor Tom Bower). “Undoing” is clearly not just a series of pat crime-movie situations that Mr. Lee casually walked into. Sincere, smart, and exceptionally well-cast and performed, the film clicks in ways that similar low-budget gangster dramas simply can’t.

A year after witnessing his loose-cannon best friend Joon (Leonardo Nam) die in the back seat of his car, Sam Kim (Sung Kang) returns home to Los Angeles’s Koreatown seeking vengeance for Joon’s death, forgiveness from Joon’s family, and a new start with Vera (Kelly Hu), the girl Sam abandoned when he left town a few steps ahead of the police. As Sam goes about disposing of his friend’s hidden remains, blackmailing the renegade cop responsible for Joon’s death, and initiating a credit card swindle to get Vera out of debt, his sole confidant is Don. But like everyone else in “Undoing,” Don has intimacy and family issues to spare. The more Sam, Don, and Vera try to protect themselves, the more they appear incapable of forging lasting and meaningful connections.

Shot in hi-definition video (with some sequences originating on more visually low-fidelity Minicam and Super 8), “Undoing” evocatively captures the parking lots, doughnut shops, sparsely furnished apartments, and freeways of Los Angeles after hours. Many of the film’s most intimate scenes take place in cars, which in the City of Angels is as it should be. Mr. Lee indulges in some unnecessary (and one suspects unnecessarily expensive) digital visual digressions that freeze his characters or juxtapose them on expressionist backgrounds that suggest K-Mart-theme photo sessions more than backstories. By and large, though, the film glides by in subdued visual tones and tempos that support its even more courageously subdued cast. Mr. Kang and Ms. Hu admirably court the anti-chemistry of the realistically co-dependent. Russell Wong, as an assassin trailing Sam, alternates flights of Christopher Walken-esque delivery with genuine circumspection. José Zúñiga, as Vera’s boss-turned-lover, and Kenneth Choi, as an exuberant young gangster, also promote to the rank of actual people what in other hands would be walking clichés. Even small preliminary scenes such as Sam’s first attempt to contact Joon’s family via his dead friend’s school-aged sister have an unforced prickly melancholy.

In a way, the detective film’s tug-of-war between style and substance is analogous to the Spirograph, a children’s drawing toy from the late 1960s that used a pencil tip to drive a plastic gear along a toothed track pinned to a sheet of paper. No matter how random the track’s path, as long as the wheel turned smoothly and the track was fixed properly to the paper, the pencil left behind an intricate and detailed moire pattern on the paper. In “Undoing,” Sam Kim travels a convoluted trail of redemption and revenge. But as narratively incomprehensible as his journey sometimes is, Sam and the rest of the cast of characters react believably and movingly to the turns of plot and twists of fate that life and death in Koreatown deals to them. The impression that they and “Undoing” leave is emotionally honest and indelible.

Through December 14 (155 E. 3rd St., between avenues A and B, 212-591-0434).


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