'Mad Money'

Rating:

BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

January 18, 2008

When Diane Keaton checks into a luxe hotel in "Mad Money," flashing a green wad of ill-gotten gains, the name she gives to the hotel clerk is "Capone."

It's gratifying to report that Callie Khouri, the maverick screenwriter of "Thelma and Louise," is back in gear. While Khouri is the director on this diverting crime comedy, she's working in that comfort territory where women bond, break bread and break laws, if not in that order.

Screenwriter Glenn Gers ("Fracture') has Americanized with considerable finesse a British TV movie about three cleaning ladies who clean out their employer. Improbably but felicitously, "Mad Money" bridges the demographic and age divide that separates three women who are all, as was said in the '60s, working for the Man.

Unlike Khouri's earlier renegades played by Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, the rebel gals of "Mad Money" each enjoy the warm backup support of a male partner. Keaton's Capone, aka Bridget Cardigan, is an upper-middle class matron, and mother of two grown children, whose breadwinner husband Don (Ted Danson), has fallen on hard times.

Hobbled by her baby boomer age and a resumé that consists primarily of a degree in comparative literature, Bridget accepts a humbling job cleaning toilets for the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City. She quickly sets her eyes on the millions of tired dollar bills that get shredded there annually. After scanning the gaps in the security system, she conspires to rip off the doomed money with a shredder, Nina Brewster (Queen Latifah), a single mother who is looking to ensure the academic future of her son. Egged on by the stop-at-nothing Bridget, Nina eventually enlists the aid of a romantically fumbling bank guard named Barry (Roger R. Cross) who has been gunning to take her out.

The final member of Bridget's gang is Jackie Truman (Katie Holmes), a young trailer-park bride with a meatpacking meathead for a husband, Bob (Adam Rothenberg). If Bridget is the gang's brains (with strategic assistance, courtesy of her idle executive husband), Nina is its voice of reason and Jackie its creature of instinct.

"Mad Money" transpires over a period of four years, during which the fortunes of the three couples improve dramatically for the better, lubricated and ultimately sabotaged by Bridget's hubris. Taking his cue from Spike Lee's prismatically structured "The Insider," screenwriter Gers spikes his chronological tale with flash-forwards of the characters in a police interrogation. The note of tension that the film strikes from the opening sequence is only heightened by our awareness that Bridget's dream-mobile is headed for a crash.

One might wish that Gers had been a little more democratic in laying out his dramatis personae: There is a too much of Bridget's micromanaging tics and too little of Jackie and Bob's back story (Holmes and Rothenberg are a quirkily amusing pair, and deserve more). Latifah and Danson come off best, giving relaxed, down-to-earth performances that ground this comic fantasy with a sobriety that seems just right for the economic eggshell walk that is America in 2008.

"Mad Money" is no "Rififi," but Khouri and Gers invest it with an individuality and generosity of spirit that lift it into the realm of guiltless pleasure.

MAD MONEY (PG-13). The heist comedy is alive and well and pulsing with women-on-the-edge nerviness, as Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes play unlikely comrades in a Federal Reserve Bank rip-off. 1:44 (sexual material and language, and brief drug references). At area theaters.