(Not in Russell Crowe is the perfect actor for the role of a heroically loyal husband: plump-cheeked, blue-eyed, with the frame of a giant teddy bear whose facial expressions range from a tender-powerful look implying ‘you can always rely on me’ to the pained grimace of a reluctant assassin which is traditionally worn with sad dignity, and which generally means ‘sorry, mate, I don’t want to do this – but c’est la vie’.
The screenwriter and director Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby, Casino Royal, Quantum of Solace) made a film about a domestic hero who is pushed out of his comfort zone in a struggle to protect his family from the all-seeing, all-controlling agents of the State. The rather short premise shows John Brennan, a community teacher from Pittsburgh (a working class town), leading a happy family life until the police come to his house and arrest his wife Lara (Elizabeth Banks) for the murder of her female boss. As there is no legal way for Lara to get reunited with her husband and seven-year-old son during the next twenty years or so, John forges a reckless plan of getting her out of the high-security prison an escape from which is most likely to end in both of them being killed by the security guards. He only has three days to realise his plan.
Like this, Haggis introduces into the film an oxymoron which he would then peddle at every opportunity: John is a philosophy teacher, yet he is also a ruthless criminal. Not that the two concepts are completely incompatible, but teachers are traditionally seen as well behaved people – well-behaved being a euphemism for boring, of course. The hero wearing blue sweaters and jean shirts (hiding his rather expanded waistline), and looking more suitable in a domestic context, is compelled by love and the State to descend to the criminal underworld and break all imaginable social and ethical rules: he cracks locks, forges documents, kills people, burns down houses and leaves corpses in the street. He interviews seasoned criminals and gets beaten by traffickers and drug dealers. Decent men in the street look at his scratched muzzle in horror and disapproval. His parents are wondering what is eating at their formerly well-behaved son-pedagogue. ‘What kind of a criminal drives a Prius?’ – one of the amazed detectives asks his colleague, creating an almost acceptable product placement joke.
John truly reaches the bottom of society, yet, magically, manages to keep intact the line that separates the ‘clean’, warm family nest from the ugly, bloody hell of the criminal underworld. John is a loving father and a dutiful son. He is attentive to the little boy and regularly visits his parents. The master of suspension, Haggis shows darkness and danger seep into the ‘cosy’ aspect of the protagonist’s life through the cracks he had caused by his criminal activities. The audience is constantly expecting for something bad to happen to the little boy whose safety is threatened both by the gangsters and the police. Camerawork is claustrophobic, paranoid; focalisation is multiple, implying that everyone is an enemy of everyone else. Strangers knock at doors late at night; people inside the house are peeping through windows or eye holes trying to make out who the visitor might be. No enclosure, be it a car or a house, is safe. Haggis is keen to show the fragile, easily crossable boundary between the house and the outside world, and the audience is left to hope that Russell Crowe’s stocky frame is big enough to block the entrance and prevent the bad things from entering the domestic ménage. Both visually and conceptually, the film explores liminal spaces as it foregrounds all kinds of borders, frontiers, crossings and edges; from porches and doors to the heavily demarcated and regulated prison and hospital environments. Throughout the film, John is constantly stopped, searched, given orders and commands. The world is at war; he has the dual task of preventing others from entering his territory while he infiltrates someone else’s domain.
As a writer, Haggis is (rather annoyingly for the viewer) not interested in the details of the murder, which is briefly presented by way of occasional flashbacks, but only in the mind of the man who is blindly, manically in love. So in love, in fact, that he refuses to believe his wife when she confesses to him that she, indeed, had murdered the boss. The character of Lara is left in the shade, purely a vehicle for inspiring the man to do heroic things. Neither her motifs nor her hysterical, aggressive behaviour are explored or clarified. Her saviour is not even interested in her true wishes, desires or motivations – he rescues her against her will and flies her and the boy to Caracas to start a new life. In a rather artificial finale, two police officers are shown to baffledly peer into the drain hole in the street in the hope to find a button from the coat of the woman murdered by Lara three years ago. The police have lost the fight with the underworld. The culprits have escaped down the drain.
A solid, if a little sparse prison break movie, The Next Three Days does not flaunt its social subtext yet it shows the System, represented by courts, prisons and the police, lose to the power of reckless, irrational love. The protagonist comes to the conclusion that ‘rational thought destroys the soul’, and that human beings should exist ‘purely in the reality of their own making’. This means rebelling against all impediments to human freedom – pushing away security guards and hospital staff, cutting phone lines and hijacking trains and cars. It also means crossing the border into another, presumably unsafe country. Unsafe as it is, however, the foreign country is nevertheless the perfect place for the family of outlaws who refuse to obey the rules of a civilised society.