Jay Rohr
The Lonely Crowd takes a shot at turning the trials and tribulations of modern romance into a compelling thriller. There’s a touch of neo-noir in this Tinder-era suspense tale. Yet, the ingredients to transmute its central idea into a grander flick just aren’t there. What’s left is a film full of potential without the entelechy to fulfill its own ambitions.
The Lonely Crowd presents us with Peter (Adam Wesley), who is incredibly disillusioned with the idea of romantic love. Spurred to go on one more date by his best buddy, he meets the enigmatic Ashley (Taylor Danehower) for drinks. Things go so poorly that she storms out into the night. Defeated and shuffling outside, Peter sees her being assaulted by a brute and races to intervene. The consequences of helping her sweep him up in a turbulent tale involving escaped criminals, corrupt cops, and the lost loot from a major heist. To survive the situation, this mismatched couple will have to find a way to get along, and perhaps in the process find love.
Thematically, The Lonely Crowd is about the difficulty of dating in the modern era. The central conundrum, besides all the criminal aspects, is that Ashley and Peter don’t seem like ideal partners. However, as the film unfolds, they find reasons to see each other as more appealing. More than simply opposites attract, it’s essentially the notion that once folks get beyond the surface level, particularly the social masquerade, there’s more to a person.
To keep things kinetic in The Lonely Crowd, the rest of the plot orbits a basic crime fiction storyline. Ashley’s ex-lover is a dangerous escaped criminal in search of a stash of cash, of which only she knows the whereabouts. This propels the picture forward in ways its romantic elements don’t always allow.
Writer-director David St. Clair has a unique gift for arranging shots that, when edited together, feel as if the performers aren’t in the same space together. It results in a weird disconnect from the start, especially when cinematography doesn’t match the edit. For instance, the film’s very first conversation takes place in a car, and shifting between speakers, the lighting changes entirely. There’s a case to be made for some kind of metaphor, but most likely it’s an early indication of what to expect from most of The Lonely Crowd. This isn’t even getting anywhere near the odd blurry edges of too many shots, not to mention the overabundance of stock footage fattening the film.
The result is a movie that has a sense of modern noirish stylization without a full toolbox to pull off the total impression. Performers who often seem to be warming up deliver their lines in a way that feels less conversational and more like people in isolation. Meanwhile, there’s a generic quality to the shot choices that don’t add much to the overall tone. Much of this could be overcome with a sharp script. With that in mind, The Lonely Crowd is like an overused boxcutter. That’s to say, it gets the job done while conveying the impression that this could all have been done better.
The first conversation that feels fluid as well as well-acted is nearly forty-five minutes into the movie. The rest is a mix of dialogue that seems like it would fit in at any community college writer’s workshop, penned by someone who hasn’t learned to stop trying to sound clever and just be natural. Characters too often try to say quotable things, snap off slick quips, or deliver predictable generic banter.
The upside is a solid sense of trajectory. The Lonely Crowd understands its themes and their intended consequences. One of the main characters, Peter, has a certain evolution into a more jagged, dangerous individual as the story progresses. At the same time, it touches on various notions about gender differences. The odd thing is that while The Lonely Crowd highlights, hoping to criticize, how people interact through stereotypes, so many of the characters are tropes that the movie doesn’t always make the observations it wants to.
Performances don’t add much to the outcome. The Lonely Crowd is peppered with lifeless individuals who aren’t very interesting on their own. Matthew Doman makes a film debut as a generic corrupt cop. Taylor Danehower (Murder at the Merriweather) fills out the role of a pretty lady with a penchant for bad boyfriends. Adam Wesley (Where the Shadows Wait) is believable as a busted jock trying to find meaning in life. Giancarlo Carmona (I Swapped Bodies with My Nemesis) plays the kind of dangerous criminal one can imagine getting stomped by an actual dangerous individual.
Much of this comes back to the script. The characters don’t have much in the manner of interesting details about them. Their overall backstories are criminal, high school lovers, and a broken athlete, all of whom seem too old to still be having some of their varied issues. Perhaps that’s the point, however, The Lonely Crowd does little to make its main characters terribly intriguing.
This flick is a great reminder that making movies is all about ambition. Anyone can get something made, if they try hard enough. This destined-for-Tubi neo-noir romantic crime drama proposes an interesting idea: what if the worst date ever turned into a gender role, romance dynamics dissecting exploration of love? The answers it presents aren’t as interesting as the question it asks.
There’s an aura of 1988’s early Keanu Reeves starrer, The Night Before, with the main difference being that The Lonely Crowd isn’t a comedy. That seriousness occasionally holds it back since it wants to be gritty while embracing a romantic optimism that its cynical storyline sometimes clashes with. Meanwhile, for better or worse, it isn’t bad enough to stray into the unintentionally humorous. Essentially, The Lonely Crowd has a lot of shots hitting the barn but rarely the bull’s eye.
