Blood on a trench coat, a wholesome-seeming wife and mom behind bars, a spouse who's devoted almost to the point of obsession: Paul Haggis' marital thriller The Next Three Days has a lot going for it, including two appealing and extremely capable actors, Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks. The plot is worked out with care, and it takes its time, unapologetically, in a manner that's perfectly suited to thinking adults. The whole enterprise reeks of class.
And that right there is the problem. There's enough intrigue in The Next Three Days -- which is based on the 2008 French film Pour Elle, starring Diane Kruger -- to keep us guessing what might happen next, partly because Haggis is miserly when it comes to doling out significant information: He give us time to ask questions before he answers them, which is something of a rarity in contemporary thrillers. The movie opens with Russell Crowe's character (we don't yet know who he is or what on Earth he's doing) driving away from somewhere (a crime scene, perhaps?), occasionally glancing back to reckon with what appears to be a wounded passenger in the backseat. Next we see Crowe's character, who's named John, at a restaurant gathering, tamping down an escalating argument between a woman who, we learn, is his wife, Lara (Elizabeth Banks), and his brother's sexy, saucy girlfriend. John and Lara leave the restaurant, pawing at each other almost before they've gotten into their car: They have a toddler son at home, but the movie wants to make it clear that these two are still gettin' it on.
Early the next morning, though, their happy little world is turned up-side-down: Cops burst into the house and arrest Lara for murder, just after she's surreptitiously removed that blood-stained coat from a hook in the hallway and started scrubbing at it in the sink. What is going on here? John has no idea, either. Fast-forward a few years -- the couple's son, Luke (Ty Simpkins), is now just starting school -- and Lara is still in the clink, pawing at John lasciviously whenever he comes to visit her. She seems to miss her son, too, pretty much. But when Luke accompanies his dad on these jail visits, he pointedly ignores her, fixing his attention on crayons, Legos, Tinkertoys, anything but his mother's face. Mom's a jailbird, dammit. And what six-year-old likes that?
That's barely the pointy tip of the corkscrew of events that The Next Three Days leads off with. As it turns out, Lara just may be in jail for life: A whiskery, earnest Daniel Stern, looking extremely lawyerlike, breaks the bad news to John, trying to impress upon him that no matter how much he may believe in his wife's innocence, the evidence is stacked against her. But John is a dreamer and a schemer -- he teaches English at the local community college, and Haggis makes it clear just how much he identifies with the subject of one of his texts, Don Quixote. And so John hatches a plan to break Lara out of the hoosegow, so they can have mad, passionate sex in the car again.
Obviously, he wants her out for other reasons. But one of the problems with The Next Three Days is that even though we're repeatedly reminded why characters are taking action, we never really feel the emotional weight of the things they choose to do. Haggis adapted the screenplay himself (the original was written by Fred Cavayé and Guillaume Lemans), orchestrating the criss-crossing plot mechanics with aplomb. He has some mischievous fun with misdirection, opening the door to a number of doubts and uncertainties via a few clever, sneaky flashbacks.
But what about his characters? Haggis gives his actors plenty to do, and yet, paradoxically, they end up with little to work with. It's clear John wants Luke to have a mom again. But as a character, the kid seems like an afterthought, a placemarker that says, "Imagine Child Here." He's shuttled and shuffled from here to there as John works out his ever-more-complicated plan for the family's future happiness.
Maybe that's part of the point -- that John is so driven, he can barely see his own kid as an individual -- but the movie's ending hints at something different. What's more, we know John and Lara are really close because the movie keeps telling us so. Haggis doesn't seem to know how to establish real couplehood closeness without equating it with hot, unfettered sex -- and hey, I'm not knocking it. But it's lazy shorthand, pretty much the only kind the movie knows how to use. (In a late scene, there is an instance of tepid hand-holding, which is perhaps included to show how much John and Lara's relationship has matured.)
The actors do their best to give dimension to all the movie's dots and dashes. Banks has a wily, kitty-cat presence: She can look innocent one minute and conniving the next, which only adds to the story's "Did she or didn't she?" intrigue. And Crowe makes even the most implausible plot turns seem wholly believable. He carries John's conviction, his heavy sense of certainty, not just in his mournful eyes but in his pants pockets: Crowe always looks weighed down, by responsibility, worry and woe. He etches out a believable character even where, it seems, none was written in the first place.
But it's not enough. Haggis has constructed The Next Three Days with care, and cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine gives it the right moody, anxiety-ridden look. But by the movie's end, after gamely following its myriad twists and turns, I realized I was probably supposed to feel as if I'd been on a journey with these people -- and all I wanted to do was get away from them. It's not clear how we're supposed to feel about John and Lara at the end of The Next Three Days. Are we supposed to admire John's doggedness or feel worried for him? Either response would make sense. But Haggis doesn't know how to draw a clear, or even a conflicted, response from us. Like other Paul Haggis movies -- even the ideologically heavy-handed Crash -- The Next Three Days is trimly constructed. But Haggis can't get to his characters' deeper underlayers. This is a thriller in which every corner is squared; if only Haggis had left a few frayed edges, the thing might actually feel alive.