Truly, my beloved hometown of Portland has an unspeakably disgraceful history with regard to crime thrillers set and shot here. Sure, Drugstore Cowboy is a classic, but look what’s come and gone since. Body of Evidence. Untraceable. Gone. Fucking Bad Samaritan.
And now we’ve got Night Always Comes coming up to bat. Alas, it’s yet another strikeout.
Producer Vanessa Kirby plays Lynette, a woman who’s supporting a brother with Down Syndrome (Kenny, played by Zachary Gottsagen) and an irresponsible fuckup mother (Doreen, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh). Even working two jobs and trying to better herself with college classes, Lynette is drowning in debt. Finally, things get to be so bad that unless she can get $25,000 in twelve hours, she and her family will get evicted.
Thus we have our night of misadventures, in which Lynette engages with adulterers, prostitutes, pimps, corrupt politicians, drug addicts, drug dealers, and more. At all stages, Lynette is caught between her desperation and guilty conscience, with both fueling her downward spiral. How bad does it get? The climactic “final boss” of the movie is played by Eli freaking Roth.
On paper, this sounds like a solid foundation for a crime thriller romp. In practice, there are a number of reasons why it doesn’t work.
First of all, while I have some slight measure of resentment for the depiction of my city as a crime-ridden hellhole… it’s tough for me to point out the lie. It’s a matter of public record that we’ve got a serious housing problem, that’s been a political hot topic for years. While business downtown has seen some measure of recovery since COVID and the Summer 2020 riots, we’ve got a ways to go and there are still quite a few boarded-up storefronts. It’s long been a matter of hometown pride that we’re a haven for strippers and sex workers. Recreational drugs have been a convoluted issue ever since marijuana got legalized and Measure 110 got passed (and repealed). The bottom line is that while the movie exaggerates our problems to an unflattering degree, I can’t deny that the underlying issues it’s talking about are very real and very present, as they are in every other major American city.
Which brings me to the second major issue. At the open, the filmmakers are aggressively blunt in repeatedly and emphatically hammering home the theme of economic inequality. All throughout the opening credits, we hear news stories about decreasing wages, increasing cost of living, unaffordable housing costs, too many people living on the street, and so on and so forth. The film was all set up to be a screed about this issue, with a protagonist forced to outrageous extremes by a predatory system.
Here’s the problem: That’s not the film we got.
The more we come to learn about Lynette, the more we learn about her dysfunctional childhood and teenage years. I won’t go into details, but suffice to say that going into prostitution and drug dealing wasn’t some new development borne of last-minute desperation — Lynette has a long history with such criminal dealings, going back to when she was a child. (Yeah, child prostitution. The film goes there.) Thus the theme of economic inequality falls to pieces because Lynette isn’t doing all this shit because of a broken system — she’s doing this because she’s a broken person for reasons that have nothing to do with the system.
Granted, it’s entirely possible that this angle might’ve worked. “Breaking Bad”, for instance, is all about a character driven to criminal activity out of a desperation to provide for his family, right up until the last episode, when the protagonist finally comes out and admits that he was never doing this for his family. At some point along the way, the lead character got addicted to his own power and building a criminal empire became an end in itself.
Lynette is likewise a character who claims throughout the entire movie that she’s doing terrible awful things for the sake of protecting her family, right up until she finally has to admit that she’s a terrible awful person who was only ever acting for herself. Why doesn’t it work as well here? Take everything else that made Walter White a compelling character and dump it in the Willamette, that’s the short answer.
Lynette is a one-dimensional character with a single-minded focus on getting all the money she can in any way that she can. With the sole exception of Doreen — who actually knew what she was doing all along, even if she lacked the vocabulary to sufficiently express it — every last character in this movie is one-note and one-dimensional, which makes for a dreadfully predictable film. What’s worse, Kenny has basically no personality aside from being the sweet helpless Down Syndrome brother, and he is the only character in this whole movie who’s remotely likeable and sympathetic.
Pretty much the only thing that separates Lynette from all the other assholes in this movie is that she does eventually realize that she is, in fact, an asshole. Unfortunately, we all know that’s exactly where the movie is headed, and we’re stuck waiting until she finally comes to that epiphany in the last ten minutes. In the meantime, we’re stuck watching Lynette burn every bridge and pick every fight with every dangerous fuckwit in the city.
As we’re reminded at every possible opportunity, Lynette is supposedly doing all of this for the sake of keeping her house. But as we’re watching Lynette ruin all her jobs and friendships, introduce herself to new criminal psychopaths, and generally give everyone every possible reason to have her killed and/or arrested, there comes a point when the cost is no longer worth it. There’s no justifiable reason for Lynette to keep her house when she’s no longer hireable and the entire city will be effectively uninhabitable for her. Hell, if these are the friends Lynette has and the people she associates with, one could argue that the city was never really any kind of home for her to begin with.
The bottom line is that by the time we’re an hour in, any rational person can already see where this is heading. And that’s exactly where the film ends up after another 40 excruciating minutes.
Vanessa Kirby is clearly trying her best, and I totally agree that she’s a wonderful actor long overdue for a leading showcase. That said, she was not equal to the task of trying to salvage this script. I could say the same for Stephan James, who is clearly too suave and too talented for the role he was given. At least Jennifer Jason Leigh gets something to work with in the film’s closing minutes. I could also point to Randall Park, Julia Fox, and Eli Roth, all of whom make use of their brief screen time to play to the cheap seats, openly embracing their roles as irredeemable one-note shitheels.
Elsewhere in the cast, I feel obliged to mention my good friends Jennifer Lainier and Jen Rowe, both of whom get blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameo appearances. And of course Dana Millican gets a customary bit part, no movie set and shot in Portland would be complete without her. Likewise, we get the obligatory shots under the Morrison Bridge on the central eastside. I was also tickled to recognize the Belmont Inn — where Lynette is briefly employed as a bartender — one of my favorite pinball spots in the city. Speaking of which, Portland is a major pinball city, and I was amused to see that recognized in a subtle way with all the pinball machines that kept popping up throughout the film.
Oh, and of course the filmmakers played fast and loose with geography. Going from the Wunderland on SE Belmont to over the Fremont Bridge in under three minutes? No fucking way. Though at least we get a movie that features the elegant Fremont Bridge instead of showing off the St. Johns Bridge for the umpteenth time.
The bottom line here is that Night Always Comes was deeply unpleasant to sit through. The characters are one-dimensional, which in turn means that the plot is predictable. This in turn means we know well in advance that Lynette’s actions will effectively amount to nothing, which means that we’re watching so many egregiously harmful felonies for no reason whatsoever. Adding insult to injury, the film opens up with the promise that it’ll be a film about systemic oppression and the root causes of poverty, only for the plot to develop themes that have everything to do with how fundamentally awful the protagonist is in ways that are useless to the audience.
Worst of all, we already have a legitimately good movie set and shot in Portland about a woman who goes to extreme lengths in providing for her family, and it serves as a genuinely searing indictment of the predatory system that keeps working families in debt. That movie is called Mother of Color. You can watch it on Tubi right now for free. Give that movie a watch and throw this one back to obscurity along with the other aforementioned crime thriller duds.