Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Dark
Nights
(Tell No One and The Dark Knight, 8/4/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
It's
probably been a long time since you've seen a movie like Guillaume Canet's
Tell No One. Relax, though—it's not your fault. Based as
it is on the bestselling work of an American novelist (Harlan Coben),
No One is the kind of old-school potboiler Hollywood used to
love to make. Alas, here in the summer stupid season (we're well beyond
the "silly season," fellow space chimps...), mall movies must
"open big" to keep their screens, and there's just no time
for even a first-rate thriller to build up enough word of mouth for
grown-ups to see it.
Consider yourself informed: Tell
No One is the kind of wire-taut thriller Alfred Hitchcock used to
produce. Indeed, it might as well be named after Hitch's own The
Wrong Man (1956), being about phlegmatic pediatrician Alex (François
Cluzet) who is suspected of murdering his wife, Margot (Marie-Josée
Croze). Eight years later, Alex is finally cleared, until things get
muddied up again by a mysterious email from, yes, the dead Margot. The
script by Canet and Philippe Lefebvre resolves the mystery with a minimum
of red herrings and cheating, though not without a fair amount of declared
exposition (think Simon Oakland's awkward peroration at the end of Psycho).
As the befuddled Alex, Cluzet looks
with a somewhat stretched version of Dustin Hoffman. He does fine, but
the film's mysterious heart rests with Marie-Josée Croze, the
Quebecoise actress known here mostly as the Dutch assassinatrix in Munich.
For this story to work, we have to believe Margot is the kind of figure
whose memory will haunt her widow for years—or at least intrigue
the viewer for two hours. Submitted as evidence of this writer's engrossment:
while during screenings I usually cover several sheets of memo paper
with notes, this time my pad was almost empty. It wasn't because I was
bored.
* * *
Speaking
of "opening big," it looks like Christopher Nolan's Batman
sequel The Dark Knight is on its way to box office immortality.
The death of Heath Ledger, under circumstances hardly super (a prescription
drug overdose), clearly had something to do with the audience's readiness
to embrace the movie. The fact it's also pretty good comes as a welcome
bonus.
For the minority of folks who may
not have seen it yet, a few caveats: The Dark Knight is indeed
unusual for the finesse and relative maturity Nolan (Memento, The
Prestige) brings to it. But it's also a typical blockbuster in most
ways. The length (152 minutes) seems justified only by the fact that
the script has about 14 endings where maybe only two or three would
suffice. Gandhi, the battle of Gettysburg, and the Holocaust are subjects
that merit epic treatment. A guy in a bat suit, alas, isn't.
It's also one of the most dour summer
movies this critic has seen yet. Weighty Themes of Identity and the
Nature of Evil doth plague the souls of Bruce Wayne and Alfred (Michael
Caine), and Nolan doesn't even bother with the rehashed neo-Gothic production
design that gave the previous Batman flicks a visual kick. This time
around, Gotham City is just present-day Chicago. But, of course, Gotham
City must be New York, so I guess in Nolan's mind the Windy City is
what now—Phoenix?
Ledger is undisputedly terrific
as a post-punk, Marilyn Manson-ish Joker. Good superhero movies need
compelling heroes, but that isn't sufficient. Memorable villains are
what make them special. Ledger's Joker is demonic but always in control—this
is not an exercise in scene-chewing, a la Jim Carrey. Ledger clearly
did his homework for the role, right down to the way he smacks his lips
because his facial scars must have destroyed his saliva glands. It's
unfortunate that nobody in the movie thinks of wiping off his clown
make-up, even after he's (temporarily) in police custody. At least that
way we'd have gotten a last look at the face of one of our best young
actors.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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