Under Suspicion (initial thoughts)

Hi Aki,

Here’s some more about Under Suspicion – it contains big spoilers though so beware.

Story is this: a respected, rich attorney, very powerful in the local community, reports finding a murdered girl while walking through the park. On New Year’s Eve, before an important party hosted by the police commissioner, the lawyer is asked by a police detective to come in and answer a couple more questions about finding the body.

Lawyer goes in and gradually finds out the cop suspects him of raping and murdering the child. The lawyer gives contradictory statements and is clearly hiding something. The ‘few questions’ turn out to be an all-night grilling. The cop is relentless in his questioning. There’s a good deal of evidence against the lawyer, but it’s all circumstantial, nothing really proves it. Lawyer maintains his innocence but Cop is positive the Lawyer is guilty. Guilty not only of this rape-murder, but another committed 3 weeks ago.

The Lawyer’s wife comes in. She reveals they are having trouble, she hasn’t slept with him in a couple years. Turns out for tax reasons the lawyer has put the house in her name, so wife is able to give permission to search the house. They find pictures of both the dead girls, proving a connection between Lawyer and the victims.

At last Lawyer confesses. He breaks down and admits to all of it. In the middle of his confession, though, another cop comes in. They have just caught the real killer in the act, with proof he killed the other two girls.

This is from an American novel. It was first filmed as Garde à Vue in France, and Lino Ventura played the cop, and Michel Serreault the Lawyer (Romy Schneider was the Wife). This movie I haven’t seen, but by all accounts it is a superb movie for the following reasons:

1. Mise en scene. This is pretty much the classic ‘two people in a room talking’ movie. They stay in this one room for almost the whole movie. The Lawyer is stuck there, and so are we. This gets us to feel just what being trapped in a room and subjected to relentless interrogation feels like.

2. Casting. Lino Ventura is one of world cinema’s all-time great tough guys. He usually plays gangsters. He’s big and gruff and manly, and we have no doubt he could beat the shit out of just about anybody he faced. Michel Serreault on the other hand is a creampuff. His most famous role is the ‘straight-looking’ club owner in La Cage Aux Folles. You know he couldn’t hurt a fly, and if Lino Ventura straightened his cuffs, Michel Serrault would end up black and blue and bloody across the room. His connection to the Cage Aux Folles role helps to cement his image as pervert, so pedo wouldn’t be a stretch for his screen persona.

3. Impact. From #1 and #2, we end up with a film that is a strong indictment of police procedures. We see that cops don’t have to have rubber hoses and torture to squeeze false confessions out of suspects. Just this sort of questioning by a big, threatening, unrelenting inquisitor can be enough to get anybody, especially a weak man who’s unaccustomed to rough words, to say anything.

Now, ‘Under Suspicion’ works against these three points:

1. 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.
2. Casting. Morgan Freeman as the Cop is slim and wiry. He is not usually a tough guy, and doesn’t play the Cop as a tough guy. Morgan Freeman is usually the Decent Man, the Reasonable Man, the Voice of Compassion and Wisdom. He just wants to find out the truth of what happened. Gene Hackman is bigger than Morgan Freeman, smart and tough. He came to prominence playing a criminal (Bonnie and Clyde) and tough, no-nonsense cop (French Connection) though he has since made a career playing a tough Mentor, or else a mean Boss. The ‘balance of power’ between Ventura and Serreault in the first movie, which went all Ventura’s way, is here slightly shifted in Hackman’s favor. This lawyer is smart, determined, strong. He would never confess unless it were true.
3. Impact. The effect of changes means that the remake is hard to take as an indictment of police methods. Instead we are left with something unbelievable; my father in fact could only make sense of the Lawyer’s confession as a way to protect his young wife, for the Lawyer claims that his wife was jealous of his attachment to his young niece. But this makes no sense, because though she might kill children, she would have to follow her husband to learn he liked these girls (the first victim is the daughter of a prostitute who lives in a terrible slum), and then be so psychotic as to kill them – not only kill them, but also rape them! And the Wife (played in the remake by Monica Bellucci) gives no hint, either in her lines nor in the way she plays her scenes, of being anything other than a normal woman who suspects her husband has attempted to molest her niece, and since that time has refused to sleep with him.

I am guessing that Hackman and Freeman wanted to work together; they had worked on Eastwood’s Unforgiven, but though they make a lot of movies, they are both the same age and play much the same part, or two sides of that part of the older, wiser man – Hackman gets the badass older-man roles, and Freeman gets the decent older-man roles, and movie scripts are not written with 2 roles for older-man parts. This script gave them the chance to really act against each other, and maybe that’s why they are given exec producer credits. But the result is unfortunate, and a lot of that goes to the casting.

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.

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.

(31 January 2009)