There's a great laugh for heist movie fans in the low-wattage comedy Henry's Crime, when ex-con Henry (Keanu Reeves) -- who has just finished doing a year in the joint -- returns to visit Max (James Caan), who's doing life.
When the recessive Henry works himself up to tell Max that he can't let himself die in prison, it's a reversal of a similar scene from Michael Mann's Thief -- James Caan's impassioned dialog with his mentor, Willie Nelson, but with all the balled-fists fervor removed. Caan now gets to use ease instead of leaning into a glass partition as if he wants to push his skull through a cubic centimeter at a time. He's the heart of this sweetheart crime story that seems inspired by Elmore Leonard's demimonde. Though it's not an adaptation, it might as well be one with all of the rough edges covered -- it's been elegantly child-proofed.
Henry himself, meanwhile, worked as a toll-booth attendant before being sentenced to jail time for a bank robbery that he basically had nothing to do with. (The booth is employment as jail cell, awash in the soul-sucking industrial blue/green that underlighted Reeves's office cubicle in The Matrix.) Proclaiming his innocence and urged by his jailhouse eminence grise Max to follow his dream, Henry, who said life without a dream is "a pretty good one," finds his fantasy after being released: He'll rob the bank he was already convicted for taking. If he did the time, he might as well do the crime.
The agreeable mildness here takes its lead from Reeves' cottony touch as Henry, whose nice-guy quality leaves his character undefined. He's supposed to be knocked out of his post-prison stupor when actress Julie (Vera Farmiga) hits him with her car. The drama happens later, folding in both a production (and a sentimental onstage rewrite) of The Cherry Orchard and a courtship between Henry and Julie that mirrors the play; Henry's plan involves a connection between the theater hosting the play and the bank across the street. And Max joins him in hatching the scheme.
Caan's Max is a Zen Borscht Belt stand-up, and without the TMJ that once froze his lower jaw with baleful intensity, the actor has found a bounce in his step. Max is a courtly old-school charmer as in love with his easy chatter as those who become his audience. His scenes with Reeves indicate that the latter actor may be the best audience member ever to appear on the screen; think back to him listening intently over the course of his career -- his rapt gaze at Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus, for example, or even his open-mouthed approval of his BFF in the Bill and Ted films. But Caan is the spicy mustard on this fatty corned beef sandwich of a movie; without him, Henry's Crime is a filling meal that wouldn't linger in the memory.
Co-screenwriter Sacha Gervasi (who collaborated here with David White) understands the need for dreams, even when prison walls - real or otherwise - keep them out of sight; he directed the pursuit-of-dreams-as-an-occupation documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil. Director Malcolm Venville keeps the indie-callused cast - Peter Stomare, Fisher Stevens, Danny Hoch, Judy Greer, and Bill Duke -- awake, not just walking through their paces. But Reeves' nondescript Henry -- he's burrowed so far into the role that he's buried by it -- so sets that tone that the score, a compilation of songs by the Daptone Records catalog mostly abetted by the velvet howl of Sharon Jones fronting the Dap-Kings, markedly raises the blood pressure onscreen when it's played. (I'm not sure if it's a good sign when it's almost as much fun to listen to the movie as it is to watch it.) You can't help but feel that the ambition of Henry's Crime was determined by the near anonymity of its title -- the movie seems to be ensconcing itself into the Witness Relocation Program.