Lake George

By Joanna Langfield

What a treat it is to watch the wonderful Shea Whigham and Carrie Coon play (and I do mean play) in the kind of quirky movie we don’t get to see a lot of these days.

The set up may be familiar: Don is down on his luck. The mobster he owes money to says he’ll be in the clear if he just “takes care of” the big guy’s former girlfriend, Phyllis, who, knowing what she knows, has gotten a little too big for her britches. Don protests, tries to do the deed and, thanks to Phyllis’s wily ways, winds up on a road trip that may or may not make him a very rich man, living happily on his beloved Lake George.

This is an intimate comic crime drama. Just when you’re laughing it up, somebody bites the dust. Not an easy mix to carry off, but writer/director Jeffrey Reiner, even with a few bumps along the way, carries us along. But perhaps the real reason it works as well as it does is the nifty combination of stars who takes us on this wacky ride.

Carrie Coon has justifiably earned legion fans for her collection of work in pieces as diverse as The Leftovers and His Three Daughters. But have we ever seen her like this? Her Phyllis knows how to work it. She’s canny, sexy and maybe even a little genuine. And Coon seems to be having a blast bringing her to life. But the heart of the movie belongs to Whigham, who, as always, brings far more to the role than what may have originally been on the page. I have never seen him, even in the smallest of supporting roles, when I wasn’t awed by the depth of his work. And it’s great to see him putting it all together here and now.