Scoop's comments:
This movie isn't bad when you consider
that it is the offspring of a marriage made in hell. In the black
trunks, writing the original screenplay, we have John Grisham, champion
of conventionally plotted popular bestsellers featuring corrupt lawyers,
the gap between law and justice, and larger-than-life villainy. In the
other corner, wearing the white trunks, we have director Robert Altman,
the irascible old challenger of filmdom's genre formats, who generally
ignores plot altogether, unless he accidentally trips over it.
Altman starts right out by saying this
ain't gonna be your usual film noir thriller, when he opens the film
with a lengthy, virtually irrelevant helicopter shot of an unpopulated
flat Georgia outback, with the camera searching all the while for a car.
Ah, there it is! In that car is a semi-sleazy lawyer (Kenneth Branagh),
back from winning another tricky case, blathering away on his cell
phone.
He makes his way to a celebratory
party, during which Altman establishes for us that the lawyer has a
weakness for good times and the ladies. As the fete ends, the lawyer
sees a woman trying to catch her own car, which has apparently been
stolen. The woman is the party's caterer, and Branagh offers her a lift
home, eventually to become enmeshed in her life, which is a gothic
Southern fable of sorts, featuring a feral, apparently crazed father who
lurks in the woods half naked with other equally crazed old coots. It's
sort of like the House Republican Caucus.
Ultimately, the film becomes sort of a
China Moon / Body Heat kind of picture, involving a woman who studies a
useful man's weaknesses, and exploits them at every opportunity. To
Altman's credit, he supplies some freshness to the usual genre
contrivances. He lets all the main characters create personality quirks,
and he uses music and offbeat POV shots to infuse McGuffin-like
significance to numerous moments that actually have no significance, all
the while having a little smirk at his devilish red herrings.
Altman's cinematic tricks are far
better than his partnership with Grisham's plotting devices, which are
sometimes fumbled. For example, we have an ex-husband who seems to be a
nearly-irrelevant cameo planted solely for plot exposition. That's a red
herring, and Altman might have made us fall for it, except that he cast
Tom Berenger in the role, thereby informing us that the character would
somehow be back and be involved in a major way. That casting was a dead
giveaway which spoiled what should have been a surprise. Altman could
have kept the tension inherent in the script by casting an obscure,
unknown actor. Such a move would have allowed him to successfully and
correctly hide the importance of the character. He failed to do so.
Everyone in the theater knew that Berenger wasn't in there to play a
cameo, and that the ex-husband must therefore have hidden significance
which would emerge later.
Hitchcock might have cast the biggest
star in Hollywood, a Brad Pitt or a George Clooney, in a major role,
then killed him off in the first two minutes, and we'd be wondering when
he'd return. That's the kind of trick he played with Janet Leigh in
Psycho. Altman, however, isn't Hitchcock, and the casting isn't a trick.
He simply gave away the surprise. (As I just did to those of you too
dense to see it yourselves.)
In general, however, I thought this was
a pleasant watch. The cast is great. Kenneth Branagh was quite effective
and understated as the Savannah lawyer. He's quite good with the accent,
as well. There are some solid background performances from Embeth Davitz,
Robert Duvall, and Robert Downey, Jr. Altman didn't really do much
Altmanesque except for the few touches I mentioned. If you didn't know
the director's name, you probably would never have suspected Altman's
involvement in such a straightforward genre picture with so little genre
deconstruction. Except for the casting mentioned above, Altman let the
plot twists work their way forward without too much art or puffery or
thumbprinting or character study to spoil the necessarily plot-driven
script, but he did add enough characterization to make the characters
less cardboard.
I didn't mind it at all, but don't go
into it expecting an Altman film, because it really isn't. I suppose it
isn't really Grisham, either, since he insisted on having his name
removed from the screenplay credit, and the pseudonymous "Al Hayes" is
the credited writer. In this case, "Al" represents Grisham's story, as
rewritten by Altman.
Although it doesn't have many of his
touches, I suppose the quality of this is somewhere in the middle of
Altman's career output. It obviously isn't Nashville or MASH, but it is
a damn sight better than Popeye or Ready to Wear or Dr T.
SPOILER COMING:
You don't notice this when you are
watching the movie, but as I rewatched it, something dawned on me. The
main set-up is impossible. How the hell could she have timed the
driveaway scene after the party, which was so essential to her seduction
of Branagh? We believed that she was an innocent bystander because of
the timing of that scene, but only because such a thing could not be
timed, and must therefore have been sheer coincidence. When we find out
that she is not an innocent bystander, we are then forced to accept that
she did manage to do the impossible. I grant you that detail served to
hide the fact that she was pulling the strings, but I'm not sure if it's
a valid plot device if one masks the character's motivations by having
them do something that can't be done.
In effect, imagine this parallel, so I
don't completely spoil the plot for you. Indiana Jones thinks of a
number from one to a million. A woman thinks of the same number. Indiana
strikes up a conversation with her based on this coincidence, and you
the audience never suspect that he is in some kind of plot in which she
has arranged to meet him and use him. After all, the plotters couldn't
know what he was thinking. This completely convinces you that he is not
being set up, and you are drawn into the plot.
But it later turns out that the meeting
was not coincidental, and that Indy was being manipulated. Ok, fair
enough, you buy all that - but then you wonder "but how did they come up
with the same random number"? Can't be, can it? It was just a trick to
lure you into the plot, just as it lured him in. Of course, you'd never
notice unless you watched the film a second time, which people rarely do
with surprise ending movies. A
similar thing happens in this movie.
