Lake George (2024) is a neat, wry, bittersweet neo-noir that earns its prefix more for its production dates than for any presto-chango twists on its source genre, which was after all the most skeptical, disillusioned, and sometimes subversively sympathetic of classical Hollywood. With a few allowances for the Production Code, it could easily be a first-generation noir as it criss-crosses a modern, sun-twinged California in which none of the essential building blocks of low-level crime have changed since the days of Dolores Hitchens and Ross Macdonald, however drastically telecommunications have globalized from candlesticks to iPhones and the Red Cars given way to the Glendale Beeline. It comes alive in its own right in the commitment and surprises of its leads, the character actors it showcases in the best traditions of the B-film, where losers, liars, and weirdos could command just as much notice as the heroes of the A-list. It may have been written as a love letter to those lives on the margins, but it never feels like a pastiche of them.

Nor does it feel like a deconstruction even as it taps and tweaks at its apparent archetypes, since even noirs of the 1940's were capable of toying with their fast-forming conventions and exploded as much as they reified as the canon freewheeled on into the 1950's. When a reluctant ex-con finds himself unable to pull the trigger on the resourceful ex-moll he was strong-armed to dispatch and subscribes instead to her counter-proposal to clean out the crook who's been pulling both their strings, the audience may be counting down to the drop of the fatale-sap penny, but for goofy, rueful, luxurious stretches, Lake George genuinely doesn't seem to care what twists may be on its horizon so long as it can inveigle its audience into a road trip where panic attacks, donuts, and the sun-setting salt gold of the Pacific count for as much as cracked safes, coitus cringeworthily interruptus, and bullets. The two-hander is worth the ride. Despite the Dietrichson blonde of her hair, Carrie Coon's Phyllis more mercurially recalls one of the dizzily round-the-block dames of Jean Hagen, freely admitting that she met her ex-partner in organized crime in rehab. "I thought I was a coke fiend! Nose like a Dyson." No sugar baby in her mid-forties and a denim boiler suit, she turns a loose-limbed cartwheel among the dune scrub and stages the photoshoot of her own burial with the critically judged splatter of an exploitation director and after point-blank capping a dude, briskly talks his girlfriend out of the mutually assured destruction of dropping a dime with one arm comfortingly around the younger woman's shoulders as if she were actually solving a problem instead of compounding it. If she doesn't suggest the sustained attention of a long con, her compulsively scattergun tactics get r-selection results. With such all-embracing cynicism that it amounts to positive thinking, she asserts cheerfully, "Everybody's playable." From the other end of the double act, Shea Whigham's Don regards her with one of his brilliantly microsurgical deadpans, a Wallace Ford-esque fireplug of regrets kept so close to the vest, the explanations for them may no longer matter as much as their desaturating effect. "I got in over my head and did something stupid." He's almost a pained joke of a goon, this chunkily middle-aged, white-collar stiff with his lame arm and paralyzing surges of panic, retro-kitted out for his unwanted job with a .45 and a champagne-colored 1983 Mercedes-Benz 300TD that coughs a conspicuous plume of black smoke when revved up, its windshield perpetually wiper-smeared in rather the same way that its driver, his more-salt-than-pepper hair wind-flopped, in a brown suit that did him no favors even before he started sleeping nights in it, looks simultaneously disreputable and square. His erstwhile target squints at him as if she can't quite believe in his obstinate reality: "Jesus Christ, you're like some nervous insurance salesman." Just throwing them together generates the friction of an odd couple that is all the more appealing for sidestepping any temptation of romance, but turning them loose on a heist which proceeds less in stages than improvised hiccups gives them the time to bond over more than their debts to Glenn Fleshler's Armen in his athleisurewear and million-dollar-view McMansion, their evasion of Max Casella's Harout with his red tassel loafers and triggerman's ready M9—mutual life-saving, whatever, disposing of bodies, a classic, days on the road and nights in motels, it's either talk or fall out, but the burger that Phyllis makes Don eat, because it is understood that he often forgets to, his blood sugar crashed, and she tipped him into full-bore freakout when she was just trying to throw him a normal scare, is better than a soulbond. $200,000 goes nowhere near as far in this recession-ridden century as it did in the post-war boom, but the fact that Don offers half to cash-strapped Phyllis when she had built it up as his bribe leaves her sincerely lost for words, no defenses against no-strings fairness. The mysteries of their tarnished pasts and present reliabilities hum through the film like tires down the asphalt sinewaves of Route 101, but the engine is the fragile, adult rapport through which his dry sense of humor emerges in tandem with her impulsive kindness. "Feel good about it?" she psychs him up as they cruise their first stash house. His comically honest answer is "I rarely feel good about anything."

The film knows its noir geography, too. Catching the 7 bus at the corner of Colorado and Verdugo grounds the action as documentarily as the digitally dotted towers that have thickened the skyline of Los Angeles, a meal in the parking lot of Grizzly Bear's Burger or the tables out front of Ossy's Bakery. "Two views for the price of one," Armen boasts of his red-tiled terrace beyond which the metropolitan grid runs out to the smog-veiled mountains, before blaming Don's fuck-up for keeping him out of the higher price bracket of Beverly Hills. The most unexpected violence occurs in the sunlit suburbs of Goleta and Thousand Oaks, in the kinds of houses which have little succulent gardens by the front door and relegate a stuffed swordfish to the wall of a garage cluttered with bungee cords and paint cans, but when the screen filled with the skull-pale boulders of the Alabama Hills, I golf-clapped to the slight disruption of the other three people in the theater. The shout-out to Lone Pine in the sign for the Trails Motel could be a nod to High Sierra (1941), but in this house the respite of Lake George itself, floating the same stratospheric blue in its ring of pines as the sky over the Sierra Nevada, is more likely to evoke the escapism of lakes and mountains in Johnny Eager (1941). Cinematographer Tod Campbell lets the day scenes flood with natural light, often striped through the dust-flecked windows and solar-tinted windshield of the station wagon which serves as more of a home for our antiheroes than any of the Eisenhower leftovers of their one-night motels, and shoots most of the night scenes with a rich sheen of sodium like the reflection off a safe's worth of gold bars. Without grotesquerie, it's the cheap, transient, lonely edges of Americana familiar from so much noir, which will never go out of style so long as characters in whom we can recognize our own losses and yearnings wash themselves out of their lives for one reason or another, drugs, disenchantment, a weakness for the ponies. "Sometimes you have to do shit you don't want to do." These chipped and weathered people, answering something in one another that isn't just greed or lust. Her obfuscating motormouth and the one full-throated fuck! he lets out in deeply humane frustration. His peculiar, battered dignity and her matter-of-fact confidence that has the desired effect even when it's flim-flam. The late-lit, wrinkled waves at the foot of Ellwood Mesa are shot as meditatively as their faces, washed side by side in cloud-skeined sea breeze. Whether a pile of skimmed, scammed cash is the best way to get it or not, who doesn't want to believe in Don saying for the first time without bitterness to Phyllis, "I guess we both can do better."

I saw Lake George at the Somerville Theatre, which I guess goes to show that I will leave the house in slithering rain for the right kind of noir even if it doesn't contain Van Heflin. It was the first new movie I had seen in theaters in just about five years and seems to stream on a variety of usual suspects for the convenience of the home viewer, though if someone asked me to program a series of neo-noirs that don't get hung up in the Venetian blinds, this one would most definitely get an airing at size. It was written and directed by Jeffrey Reiner, who seems to love film noir for its philosophy more than its tropes, and I don't even care that like some of its studio-system ancestors it jinks just a little on the way to its elegantly reflective ending. I must now fervently hope it is not the only time I see either of its leads carrying a feature. This insurance brought to you by my rare backers at Patreon.