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The first time Halle Berry and Bart Layton met was, appropriately enough, in Los Angeles. The Oscar-winning actor had just read Layton’s screenplay, an adaptation of Don Winslow’s hardboiled novella Crime 101, and appreciated the cops and robbers of it all. And yet, it was the image Layton intended to craft of a character named Sharon, an insurance broker to the rich and powerful in the City of Angels, which most spoke to Berry.
“I just don’t understand this character, I know her because I’ve been her,” Berry told the filmmaker in their first meeting. And it’s a kinship she still feels months later when she sits down to speak with us about the finished film.
“I understand what it means to be a woman of a certain age and to feel marginalized, and to feel like there’s no place for you,” Berry says when we catch up in New York City. “That your industry that you loved so much would rather do away with you if they could. You know, most women, when they get to be about 40, we see them less and less, and it’s harder for them to procure really meaningful work. And not just work, but work that really exemplifies who they are and where they are. So I related to that in Sharon, because she has worked so hard to get to the top in her industry just to be told that because of the number that’s assigned to her due to her birth, she’s aged out and she has no more value. That’s a really hard pill to swallow.”
It’s a telling context, too, for a crime thriller that’s set in the sun-soaked hills around Hollywood. As Layton notes, “Those looks, youth, and beauty are the currency of LA.” And like every other monetary value in his and Winslow’s brutally sober-eyed estimation of our world, they are leveraged by the most affluent and insulated (and male) to exploit the perpetual underclasses, even those who precariously think they have “made it.”
It’s a distinct context for a nuanced web of thievery, greed, and grievance, even as Crime 101 more than passingly resembles the great crime films of yesteryear. At one point in the new movie, an extraordinarily successful jewel thief who calls himself Mike (Chris Hemsworth) and the cop trying to bring him down, Lou (Mark Ruffalo), outright debate what is the best Steve McQueen flick: Bullitt with its car chases or The Thomas Crown Affair with its gentleman thief playing confidence games of his own. Hemsworth tells us the scene was fun to play in part because he loved so many of the great cops and robbers movies that Crime 101 intentionally evokes.
“In films from the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and even up to the early 2000s, it was allowed to be left up to the audience if this was a good person or a bad person,” Hemsworth remembers. “It wasn’t so defined or trope-y. Each of these characters [in Crime 101], I found, to be quite surprising and didn’t fit the mold or the archetype. It’s just a beautiful nostalgia.”
“Adult films,” his co-star Berry adds.
That nostalgia for a certain kind of onscreen moral ambiguity is something that director Layton appreciated even before he was an adult.
“I think the first thing I watched when I was nine or 10, which my mum introduced me to, was The Sting,” the director says. “That was like the first properly adult movie that I ever watched, and I was just totally captivated by it. I come back to that a lot, and then I guess I loved the Billy Friedkin movies from the ‘70s and ‘80s [like The French Connection and Sorcerer]. They had this very visceral quality, the characters were real, they were flawed, they existed in the same world that you and I inhabit.”
That more nuanced world, painted in shades of gray despite the Beverly Hills sunshine, is something Crime 101 exudes with Ray-Bans on. A bit like another iconic Los Angeles heist movie, Michael Mann’s Heat, Layton’s new thriller is an ensemble piece with three protagonists: Hemsworth’s introverted and isolated thief; Ruffalo’s over-the-hill detective who was never good at playing the politics of the department; and Berry’s insurance liaison who still can talk bored billionaires into insuring every facet of their home.
These people should ostensibly be adversarial to one another, yet things are a bit more complicated when paths cross. It’s less “good guys” and “bad guys,” and more as if colleagues in the same industry get the chance to compare notes at a convention.
“Our characters are sort of salt of the earth,” says Berry. “They come from the same cloth.” Meanwhile Hemsworth points out there is even a line he loves in the script where Sharon says those who come from chaos crave order.
“It sort of sums up the two of them,” the Australian muses, “having come from difficult backgrounds and difficult times, and in an attempt to sort of find that foundation they didn’t get as children, they’re building themselves up through protection mechanisms, through superficial wealth.”
Their director acknowledges the film is first and foremost a thriller, one with car chases, violent jewelry robberies, and gun-pointing standoffs. But within this scenario, he hopes to raise some questions.
Says Layton: “For me, this was about the kind of social strata of Los Angeles and the incredible status pressure that motivates people. You might find people who devote their whole life to the pursuit of something, which wasn’t really about what they felt was important. It was about how other people would see them, and if other people saw themselves as successful, they would feel successful… so what unites these characters is they’re all coming to a crisis point where the thing that they’ve been doing and devoting their lives to is not working anymore, and they need a change. Something radical has to shift.”
Whether as a Hollywood player, a jewel thief, or the claims adjustor insuring those jewels, there comes a time when it makes more sense to stop playing off each other in a rigged game. Such a thought might even be “crime 101.”
Crime 101 opens only in theaters on Friday, Feb. 13.
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