Payback Straight Up – Director’s Recut version

Hi Aki,

A couple of days ago I watched Payback: Straight Up the director Brian Helgeland’s recut version. (Helgeland had to deal with two studios, Paramount and Warners, in making the movie; Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions was also the producer of record. And even though everybody had read the script, when they saw the movie, which was just what the script had advertised, they didn’t like it. They wanted more fun, apparently, and two days after Helgeland won the Oscar for Best Direction of LA Confidential he was fired from Payback and they shot a new opening scene and scenes that replaced all the third act. Seven years later Helgeland got a chance to recut the picture closer to the script; this version is not quite the cut he and editor Kevin Stitt delivered to the studios, but it is closer to a fine cut, finessed version of that.)

The story is based on a Donald Westlake pulp-paperback crime novel which he wrote under his Richard Stark pen-name. The book was The Hunter about a guy name of Parker who was double-crossed in a heist and now, a few months later, comes back from the dead to get the money that was his share. He has to wade through about a dozen bodies and go up against the now-corporate crime organization ‘The Outfit’ to get it; but Parker gets it and goes on to feature in many other books. The 1961 or so book was made into the 1967 John Boorman film Point Blank starring Lee Marvin (as ‘Walker’ not ‘Parker’) which stressed the story’s more existentialist aspects and made other changes as well, and is at the top of most everybody’s lists as one of the greatest crime tough-guy movies of all time. So Helgeland did himself no favors when he tried for the remake here. Helgeland loves pulp and genre and he wanted to get closer to the Westlake novel. Mel Gibson was a perfect star for the project, and everything looked good at the start.

Story shows Mel Gibson’s ‘Hunter’ (not ‘Walker’ or ‘Parker’) walking back over a bridge into the city (in the story it was New York, but this version shot in Chicago and never named the city) just like in the book. He hasn’t a penny to his pocket and proceeds to rack up very easily a few thousand dollars by theft and fraud. (This establishes that Hunter doesn’t really need to go after the money he was cheated out of; indeed this is a violation of the original ‘Parker’s’ commandment of never getting tangled up with the big criminal organizations, but he does it in the book too.)

Next stop is his wife’s apartment. She (Deborah Kara Unger) stumbles home late at night, and he busts in on her. She’s alone and he’s disgusted by the needle marks on her arm. They get into a knock-down fight in the kitchen, and he carries her into the bedroom where he takes away her heroin and shooting works and locks her in. She has told him she’s getting a couple thousand bucks a month from Val Resnick as ‘payoff’ though it’s not yet explained just what has happened. Hunter showers and sleeps on the couch. When he wakes up in the morning he finds his wife dead in bed – she has gotten hold of another shooting works and has overdosed. (This convenient exit is the same in the book as I recall. It’s left unclear whether the OD was accidental or if she has deliberately suicided.)

Now Hunter lies alongside his wife’s corpse and recalls how he got into this mess. He hooked up with Val who put him onto a money-laundering operation by the Chows, a Chinese crime bunch. Every day around noon they drive off with a suitcase full of cash. Hunter arranges to hit them on Friday, and they get away with the money after a particularly brutal assault on the Chows (Helgeland talks in the commentary of liking stories and heroes with a certain ‘balls to brain ratio’ and seems to like Hunter having more balls than brains, but in the original story, and here too as you’ll see, the hero is quite resourceful). But in the split between Hunter, Val, and Hunter’s wife Lynn, there isn’t enough money for Val. He needs $130,000 to buy back into the good graces of the Outfit and get a job with them. And the Chow heist only brought in $140,000. Lynn shoots Hunter twice in the back, Val leaves a picture of Hunter with another girl which Val has used to play on Lynn’s jealousy, and the two drive off, leaving Hunter for dead. (But nothing kills Hunter!)

A messenger comes to the apartment on the appointed day with Lynn’s cash, and Hunter ambushes him and starts on a trail that leads him to Val, and Hunter’s $70,000 demands. But Val and everybody else have no intention of just giving Hunter the cash, even though to the Outfit such money is petty change. Instead Hunter has to kill Val, then Carter, one of the upper echelon, then ambush Fairfax, before Mrs Bronson, who’s a voice on the phone and seems to be as high up as anybody, agrees to send the money to the drop where Hunter tells them. Of course she double-crosses him and sends instead an army of killers, and he expects it. So Hunter (in the third act which is totally different from the 1999 theatrical studio version) kills or knocks down all the killers at the train station. But even as he puts his hands on the blue backpack with the money, he’s shot down by a woman assassin (Helgeland said he liked having Hunter’s weak spot be women, which is why he made Bronson a woman, and had the coup de grâce delivered by a woman.) He staggers down the steps to the street, where three more hit men are waiting; manages to kill them by skill and dumb accident before he collapses in the gutter and passes out, seeming to die. But the woman from the photograph (Maria Bello), a hooker Hunter used to drive and bodyguard (in a nod to Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa apparently) appears – she’s been protecting Hunter and protected by him throughout the story – and slaps him back awake, revived from the dead again.

She drives him across the bridge he walked in on, and he lies there bleeding to death, the cash under his hand holding her hand. ‘Where to now?’ she asks and he answers, ‘Just drive, baby.’ (He’s mentioned a doctor who might save him, presumably the same one who saved him before, but Helgeland said he shaped this ending to be like that of Cool Hand Luke where Paul Newman’s Luke ends up dying, and smiling, in the car at the end – only we don’t see him die there, and here too Helgeland wants to leave us able to choose our own ending.)

The movie is very hard-edged with a dry, laconic sense of humor. There isn’t any humor in the original story, as I recall, and in Point Blank the only moment of humor is when Walker reacts to the corporate Outfit’s executives when they seem to belittle what he’s asking them for. The humor here adds a very nice touch. One point that embarrasses me to watch is Lucy Liu’s turn as a dominant tough-broad hooker who beats up Val and is beaten by him. The whole concept is a bit ridiculous, doesn’t give me any chuckles, and could only work as referring to Val’s lack of manhood. And yet Hunter himself is unmanned by his feelings for women and the only ones to hit him are his wife and the hitwoman in sneakers at the station. But I’m sure all the teen boys loved seeing Lucy Liu in leather chaps using the whip on Val.

Point Blank is one of my favorites, and I like the original pulp novel too. The idea of the guy who has one focus and doesn’t let anything stand in the way of getting it, appeals a lot to me. It also has something of the flavor of the later Don Siegel movie Charlie Varrick, Last of the Independents when all the other members of the criminal underworld are employed by, or trying to be employed by, the Outfit, which is nothing but a white-collar corporation now, far from the notions of Puzo’s The Godfather or the gangster gangs of the 1930s. The lone operator, surviving by balls and brains – but mostly by brains, because balls alone just won’t plausibly make a dent in the Outfit – it’s something of an American ideal, something out of Westerns and movies as diverse as Tucker An American Dream.

(25 April 2009)

The Brave One

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched The Brave One a new take on Michael Winner’s Death Wish from so long ago – must be 30 years ago. This new one stars Jodie Foster as the vigilante, directed by Neil Jordan (though he doesn’t have any script or story credits) and was produced in part by Joel Silver.

The story: Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) has a radio show in which she does personal stories about New York city. She is happy and on top of the world. Her show is popular and they want to make a TV version. Her boss loves her. She has a fiancé who’s a doctor and they are so so so haaaaaaapy together that you know it will soon take a bad turn. Her friend even tells her, ‘you are too happy.’

Yep – they are attacked in the park, and brutally beaten. Fiancé ends up dead, Erica is in hospital 3 weeks recovering. She tries to get her life back together but is too upset. In constant fear – for her job entails walking all over the city – she tries to get a pistol, but the 30-day permit period seems too long for her so she buys an illegal gun.

Then one day in a convenience store she sees a murder. The killer knows she is in the store. To protect herself she kills him and runs away. Some days later, on the subway, she is threatened by some punks. She shoots both of them.

Now meanwhile we follow the parallel story of a police detective (Terence Howard) who ends up in charge of the investigation into the ‘vigilante killings’ as they come to be known. Erica kills again, but she also starts interviewing the detective. He used to listen to her show, so he talks to her when he won’t talk to the other media. They become friends.

She goes so far as to kill a wife-killer the detective tells her he wishes he could bring to justice. But this brings the detective to suspect her. He as much as tells her that he won’t let their friendship stand in the way of arresting her if he has enough evidence. But she is so distraught about the whole thing – she already tried to give herself up – that she doesn’t flinch.

Now just at the point when she swears she won’t do it any more (an artificial second curtain ‘bright moment’ insufficiently motivated to believe in) she gets a lead on the three guys who killed her fiancé and beat her up. She goes to kill them after they mail her video to her cell phone of the attack (one had a video camera while they were beating her). She forwards the video to the detective and goes to meet them. The detective is frantically trying to get there before anything can happen.

She finds the punks and kills one. She kills the second. But the third one gets the drop on her and is killing her with an iron bar when the detective comes in. She points her gun at the punk, detective points his gun at her. Standoff. Then she hands over her gun.

Then the detective hands her his own gun. Tells her to go ahead and shoot. She kills the third punk. Detective has it all figured out: it was these three punks who had the gun all along, they were just on a killing spree, there was no ‘vigilante’ after all. He makes her shoot him in the forearm with her gun (the ‘vigilante’ gun) so that he can report that the punk got in a fight with his partners and killed them all, and when the detective came the punk shot him, and the detective had to fire back in self-defense.

Erica walks away. She even gets her dog back (the punks took it after they beat her up – now this is impossible, say some guys attacked you and beat you up in front of Jack, would Jack be their pet for the next couple of months? Doubt it!). But her voiceover tells us there is no going back, she isn’t the woman she was before, she is that stranger – the killer.

There are a few visual riffs on Death Wish. But here are a couple problems: Bronson who starred in Death Wish was already an action star, had been in a leone western. The gun he gets is a colt 6-shooter. So Death Wish becomes a wrinkle on Coogan’s Bluff and Dirty Harry: the ghost of the old Western justice come to visit the modern metropolis. We don’t really believe Charles Bronson as an architect, but when he gets that gun, we do – it’s as if Bronson is now becoming himself.

Contrast this to Jodie Foster who does not have that persona. The closest her film roles come to this is Taxi Driver and the real-life ugly incidents that followed it. it’s odd that she would be in this movie. And it twists my head to think of those three images – her now here, her in Taxi Driver, and her as an image in the assassination attempt. Of course she gives us her usual well-thought out, researched, skillful performance.

But what we have are three contrasting points of view wrestling for mastery in the picture: jodie wants to do a riveting psychological portrayal. Joel Silver and the Warners brass want a female Death Wish series. And Neil Jordan wants, it seems, to show that he can deliver a visually interesting picture as director, that he’s not just a writer.

So Jordan gives us beautiful visuals, and does all these fancy tricks with the camera that are completely inappropriate to the subject matter. This is a story that you either shoot flat, very matter-of-factly, gritty, realistically, naturalistically – or else you make it into a surreal nightmare (which Warners and Silver are NOT going to accept).

And Foster cries and tries to act beyond what the material will allow. I say ‘beyond it’ because if this woman is really so distraught, I can’t see her succeeding in what she does. She might be repressing everything in order to survive, and her control might come out of that, but then you doubly don’t want to shoot it in this hyper-real way that Jordan and Philippe Rousselot, the DP, use. You want to desaturate colors and aim at near black and white, you want to keep the camera eye-level, at a medium shot most of the time, an invisible camera style, and you want to emphasize control as she does. The camera has to be as repressive as she is, or else where is all the emotion in the camera moves coming from? From the woman who she is not letting out?

The finale is pure Joel Silver wish-fantasy garbage. I just can’t believe the detective doing what he did. For one thing, this detective is smart. He would know that if he lets erica go, she will kill again and go on killing until she gets herself killed. To protect others, to protect her, the detective can do her no better favor than to arrest her and see she is locked away.

But then, you see, you don’t get sequels!

(24 April 2009)

3:10 to Yuma (2007)

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched 3:10 to Yuma the 2007 remake of the 1957 picture in a pan-and-scan version.

Story (briefly, this time) has poor rancher Dan Evans (Christian Bale) crossing paths with Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) when Wade robs the railroad payroll stage. Wade and his gang go on to town, have a drink, and depart for Nogales Mexico, but Wade himself stays behind to sleep with the pretty barmaid who is not at all unwilling.

Evans sends his sons back home but goes on to town himself to try to convince his banker to give him a break on what he owes on the ranch land, there’s a drought in Arizona and the banker seems to be doing everything he can to drive Evans off – including burning down Evans’s barn. The banker won’t listen to Evans’s plea because the railroad is coming through their town, and that land will be worth a lot more when the railroad is there.

In the bar, Wade sketches (his hobby) the nude barmaid in bed and when he goes downstairs, there’s Evans. Evans complains that Wade in using his cattle to rob the coach has cost him dead steers and time; Wade pays Evans for his cattle, his time, his son’s time. Evans asks for even more while the lawmen come in behind Wade and take him captive.

Evans then joins the deputies to take Wade to Contention, the railhead, so’s they can put him on the 3:10 to Yuma prison to be hanged. For this Evans is promised $200 if they put Wade on that train. $200 happens to be what Evans owes on the ranch land; it’s also what the Government paid him for losing his leg in the Civil War.

But it won’t be easy: Wade’s gang has got wind of his capture and are gathering to come rescue him.

The posse takes Wade to Evans’s ranch for the first night. There Wade romances Evans’s own wife (Gretchen Mol) and she seems a bit too interested in him, which angers Evans. More, Evans’s 14-year-old son William is impressed by the outlaw’s style and speed with a gun, and dismissive of his wimp dad.

This triangle, Evans and Wade sparring over the boy’s affection and admiration, is the main b-story here. Evans will stick to the deal to put Wade on the train even after he’s the last one, in part for the money, in part to prove to his boy that he’s not a wimp; in doing so Evans improbably earns the outlaw’s respect.

The second night the posse bed down in Apache territory – a shortcut they chose to beat Wade’s gang to Contention. But the Apaches fire on them, Wade manages to save them and kill the Apaches (winning Williams’ further admiration) and leaves with all the horses.

But the next day Wade finds himself forced through the tunnels the railroad is digging through the hills, and is taken by the railroad crew, and tortured. Evans and the posse catch up, but the railroad crew won’t hand Wade over alive, so there’s a shootout and the posse and Wade have to fight for their lives to escape. All that’s left of the posse now is the chief Pinkerton detective, Evans, and William.

(The chief implausibility of the movie is that nobody just kills Wade, even when he has a gun on them or is shooting at them. For some reason they do all they can to deliver him alive to the train so he can be killed at Yuma.)

In Contention, the gang catches up with the posse (holed up in the bridal suite of the hotel) and offer money to any citizen who’ll help them. Since the railroad seems unpopular with most of these folks, the whole town is now against them. The local marshall bows out, and the Pinkerton detective, reckoning the odds, also gives up. Only Evans is left. He makes a deal with the Pinkerton: if Evans will get Wade on the train, the Pinkerton will pay his wife $1000, and take William home. Deal.

Now Evans must fight his way through town to reach the rail station, and push Wade along before him. Halfway through their journey, Wade jumps Evans and has him at his mercy, but Evans explains that he wasn’t a hero in the war, and his son holds him in contempt, and implies he’s really doing all this to win his boy’s respect. At this Wade changes his tune, lets Evans up, and agrees to offer no more resistance but run with Evans to the station.

(This is the key moment in the story, and our acceptance of the end depends entirely on whether we accept this change in the outlaw. It did not convince me.)

Wade and Evans run, shoot, fight their way to the station. The train pulls in. Now they just have to get from the station to the rail car where there’s no cover – and the last members of the gang, including the Mexican sharpshooters, are waiting. But William has not left, and he looses the cattle from a nearby pen and drives them in between. Evans and Wade make it to the prison car, and Wade goes meekly into the cell on board.

But even as he has succeeded, Evans falls – shot in the back by Wade’s chief lieutenant, Charlie Prince. Wade comes out of the rail car and looks down on the dying man. William runs up and holds his father in his arms and congratulates him for having done it. It’s clear now that William respects his father and always will; he is now cleansed of outlaw-love and will lead his life, we presume, as a hard-working rancher supporting his mother and younger brother, and grow up to be a man like his father.

Meanwhile Charlie Prince gives Wade his special gun, the one with the black handle and golden crucifix. In a moment of stupefying non-suspension-of-disbelief, rather than ride off to Mexico with his gang, Wade shoots down Charlie Prince and the sharpshooters, the last members of the Wade gang, then goes back into the prison car. (He has already told Evans that he has escaped Yuma prison twice, and seems confident he can escape a third time.)

As the train pulls away, Wade settles in the cell on the prison car, but he does whistle. His well trained horse obediently gallops alongside the train, and we are left to imagine Wade will bust out of the rail car as soon as the train gets out of town.

This is based on an Elmore Leonard story back when he was still doing mostly Western tales; the original movie from 1957 sounds like a cross between Shane (the rancher is played by Van Heflin in both) and High Noon (Frankie Laine sings the title song for both as a recurring motif and both share the clock ticking down to when the train comes in to town).

I must give special credit to the DP here. All the lighting is beautiful (though night interiors are too yellow for my taste). They shot on location in winter when the sun would always be low in the sky and the local colors would be at their peak. It’s the best thing in the movie and I wish I’d seen it widescreen on a film print in all its glory.

There are two big implausible elements to the story the filmmakers have to convince us to overlook:

1. Poor rancher (and one-legged man!) risks his life – and succeeds – in bringing an outlaw to the train
2. Charismatic psychotic outlaw feels so much respect for the one-legged rancher that he will not only help in his own incarceration but murder his own men to avenge the rancher.

The film succeeds in convincing me of neither of these.

More, the theme of the movie lies in persuading us as well as William, that the honest, hard-working life is a better one to choose than the outlaw’s life of danger excitement sex and riches. And although William ends convinced, the final moments of laughter as we see how Wade will easily escape the train to steal and kiss another day, leave us in the audience admiring him more. After all, Evans may have saved his ranch, but he has lost his life; Wade has his life and soon will regain his freedom.

On the recurring notion of the ‘badass’ in today’s movies, I have to mention especially Ben Foster’s portrayal as Charlie Prince. The way he moves and is garbed, the way he wears his pistols backwards in the holster, the way his hat is too big for his head, all contribute to one of the finest portrayals of a young punk in my memory. At the same time the film shows Charlie Prince as deadly quick and accurate with his guns, and a cruel punk who is actually hiding behind his guns, and has no real strength of character or guts. His desperate efforts to rescue Wade seem to be another implausibility of the story, until we see that Charlie without Wade is nothing, and Charlie knows it. Russell Crowe plays Ben Wade on the other hand more as Mephistopheles than badass, though in truth he is a more dangerous man than Charlie. But Wade is charming with the ladies, and this carries over to a seductive appeal to young William as well, it seems, to Dan Evans himself. Wade is here the Tempter trying to win Evans away from the hard-working honest life. But Evans (again improbably) resists all temptation and sticks to his principles.

(20 April 2009)

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)

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)