Under Suspicion and Remakes

Hi Aki,

Mise en Scene. Director Steven Hopkins and producers (the film stars Morgan Freeman as the Cop, and Gene Hackman as Lawyer, and both are also credited as Exec Producers) decided to follow the traditional means of ‘opening up’ the story. We see numerous flashbacks of the Lawyer’s story, as well as the accounts of the investigations. In an interesting technique, we see the Lawyer and Cop at the murder scenes while they continue the questioning. We also see many scenes that cut away to the party going on where the Lawyer is due to give a toast asking for donations for hurricane relief funds (Under Suspicion is set in Puerto Rico). This relieves us of the unbearable pressure of being in the interrogation room. The interrogation room itself is broken into 3 parts: the detective’s plush, rich, spacious office, the bare interrogation room itself, and the outer offices at police station. All this removes us from the pressures that the Lawyer must be feeling. This leaves us, at the end, unable to understand why he would make a false confession. When he does confess, and then is proven innocent, we can’t understand it or even believe it.

OOOOOOOOOOOH, so he said he didn’t even do it, because of the pressure!!  I got it now!!

He said he didn’t do it, finally under pressure he admitted he did do it, right before another cop comes in to say they just caught the REAL killer.

The usual approach to this might have been to set it in a small Southern town, with Freeman, the black man, as suspect. However, this raises the problem of how a black man gets to be so prominent a citizen. If we can accept that, though, then we can easily accept that the Cop as Hackman might not like it at all that a black man would be rich and powerful with a young, beautiful wife, especially if we make her white, and the little girls are also white. This way makes some sense, but at the same time it shifts the Impact away from ‘cops can abuse their powers, and not all confessions are true’ to ‘racism is still alive and well.’ The indictment of police powers might get lost under the covering of the race relations.

I guess the director wasn’t very talented.

Again, this is Hollywood, and if I’m right in my guess that the two stars are the real power behind the movie, then the director might not have any real influence over casting, or script. I don’t think of Hopkins as a great film director, I consider him (I could be wrong) more of a stage director who works well with actors but doesn’t really understand movies.

So I think that not only did director Steven Hopkins (and the producers – the script certainly called for this mistaken ‘opening-up’) get the basic approach to the movie wrong, but the casting further undermined any potential effectiveness.

Remake is hard, especially when the original is great.  You can’t do much better than the original.  Filmmaking is tough, man!

Yeah, this is a fundamental problem with remakes. They always try to remake GREAT movies. Of course they all fail! They should remake MEDIOCRE movies that have great IDEAS behind them – then they can make it better. People LOVE the old great movies, and we can be sure that film critics and reviewers will have seen, and loved, those old great movies. This means when something like Under Suspicion comes out, the reviews will many of them include lines like, ‘based on the great French film … not as good as the original’ – which is going to kill it. Of course in this case, they could have, and should have, done shot-for-shot remake: Americans don’t watch French movies, and most American filmgoers in 2000 were 3, 4 years old in 1982 when the French original was made. So go with younger stars, do it in a room, do it as an indie, you’ll be fine.

But again, I’m guessing that this film started when Freeman and Hackman wanted a script they could star in together. This idea was probably floating around, so they picked it.

One other BIG problem of the movie, the remake, is the DP. All DPs want to make ‘pretty pictures’ and only the GREAT DPs will make ‘pictures that work with the story.’ here in Under Suspicion, the lighting and colors are really quite beautiful, and this makes sense in the scenes in the Lawyer’s fabulous mansion. Not so much sense in the detective’s office, it looks like the office of a lawyer in a million-dollar law firm. And even less sense in the flashback scenes in the slums among the drug addicts and the hookers – man, you want those scenes to look dirty and ugly, not pretty-pretty-pretty for the DP show-reel!

(01 February 2009)