Changing Lanes, Changing Lives

 

“How can I change the world,

If I can’t even change myself?

How can I change the way I am?

I don’t know.

I don’t know.”

—Faithless, Salva Mea

I heard that lyric again the other night, quietly, as the day was winding down and I wasn’t trying to think too hard. But it found me anyway. There’s something about it that bypasses intellect and goes straight to the place where your unfinished business lives. The part of you that still flinches. You still wonder if the change you claim to want is still out of reach.

A few days later, I rewatched Changing Lanes. Not because I planned to, not for content or critique, but because I saw the title in a list and felt something stir. And what unfolded wasn’t nostalgia or even entertainment. It was recognition. A gut-level awareness of what this film actually is: not a thriller, not a legal drama, but a confession in two voices.

It opens with a crash. Literally. Two men, Gavin Banek, a high-powered lawyer rushing to file a crucial document, and Doyle Gipson, a working man on his way to a custody hearing, collide on a New York highway. It’s inconvenient. Frustrating. But it shouldn’t be life-changing.

Except it is.

Gavin flees the scene, leaving behind a folder. Doyle, stranded and late, finds himself holding leverage he never asked for. From there, the story doesn’t escalate, it unravels. Retaliations mount. Legal sabotage, forged documents, threats, violence. It would be absurd if it weren’t so familiar.

What’s really happening is that both men are losing the lies they’ve told themselves about who they are.

Gavin believes he’s a provider, a closer, a man doing what’s necessary. Doyle believes he’s reformed, sober, steady. But the accident doesn’t just disrupt their day. It breaks the dam. What spills out is not chaos, but character, character under pressure, cornered, revealed.

That, I think, is the film’s great honesty. It doesn’t present redemption as epiphany. It presents it as an aftermath. You don’t become better because you want to. You become better because something cracked, and you finally stopped trying to plaster over it.

This isn’t theoretical for me. I’ve felt that crack. I’ve lived inside the slow, humiliating realization that change doesn’t start with a plan. It starts with failure.

Trauma did that to me. Not all at once, and not cleanly. But it burned away the illusions I’d built. It made me sit in rooms I didn’t want to be in, listening to myself say things I didn’t want to admit. And over time, because there was no other choice, I started to change. Not into a new person, exactly. Just into someone who could tell the truth without flinching.

That’s what makes Changing Lanes feel so urgent, even now. It’s a film about men who think they’re in control until they’re not. Those who think they’re justified until the damage becomes undeniable. Those who think redemption is something you earn, until they realize it’s something you build very slowly, and only after you stop lying.

For Gavin, that means walking away from a fraudulent win. For Doyle, it means giving up his edge, the folder, the leverage, the righteous anger. Neither of them wins. That’s not the point. The point is that they stop. They choose a different lane. Not because they’re better. Because they’re broken enough to know they can’t keep going.

I’ve spent a long time fascinated by the idea of redemption. Not the glossy kind. The kind that happens in private. The kind that has no audience, no payoff. The kind that’s hard and ongoing and deeply unglamorous.

But what I’ve also learned, what this film underlines, is that the road to redemption always runs parallel to the road to damnation. The difference isn’t the starting point. It’s when you notice you’re veering, and whether you care enough to steer back.

And sometimes, heartbreakingly, the thing that sends us veering is not malice but righteousness. That sense of being wronged, misunderstood, dismissed. Gavin feels it when Doyle refuses to let the accident go. Doyle feels it when Gavin gets away clean. And that righteous fuel powers all the worst choices they make. They don’t betray their values. They obey a warped version of them. That’s the danger.

But there’s hope in that, too. Because if our worst moments come from misplaced conviction, then our better moments can come from reexamined belief. From asking harder questions. From pausing long enough to feel the cost of what we’re doing.

That’s what the film offers, not a moral lesson, but a mirror. And in that mirror, we see the costs of speed, of pride, of assuming we know what the other person deserves. We see how easy it is to weaponize pain, and how hard it is to put that weapon down.

But we also see that it’s possible.

I think that’s why the Faithless lyric hit me so hard. Not because it’s dramatic. Because it’s real.

“How can I change the world,

If I can’t even change myself?”

It’s not a question you answer. It’s a question you carry.

Maybe that’s the work. Not to solve it. Just to live in its shadow, honestly. To keep driving. To stay alert. To notice the next turn in time.

Because change isn’t a declaration.

It’s a decision you make over and over, until it stops feeling like performance and starts feeling like truth.

Like mercy.

Like choosing a better lane, even if no one sees you signal.

Photos by Kerry Hayes from Changing Lanes (2002), featuring Samuel L. Jackson as Doyle Gipson and Ben Affleck as Gavin Banek. © 2002 Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.