On the grift

I’m not entirely sure what to make of The Grifters, Stephen Frears’ 1990 con film with John Cusack, Angelica Huston and Annette Benning. On one hand, the film is replete with great scenes, great acting and a tremendous, Hitchcockian score by Bernstein. The framing and lighting, always meticulously designed to reveal precisely the most important bits of information, are a near-perfect update of the shadowy noir compositions to which they pay tribute. There are wide variety of wry, novelistic supporting players, including the always excellent Xander Berkely and J.T. Walsh. All of the leads, especially Huston and Benning, are devilishly watchable.

But Jim Thompson’s script is paced all wrong. It never properly lays out the stakes, and it packs too much new information into the final half. The resolution doesn’t feel like much of an ending at all, just an archetypal noir shoulder-shrug, as if Thompson couldn’t be troubled to actually provide closure to any of the themes he tossed off in the body of the script. So many disparate motifs are hinted at, raised, dropped and never returned to that I couldn’t keep track. Frears manages great control over individual sequences, but doesn’t seem to have any idea what the film as a whole is about.

It’s the same problem, in many ways, that plagued Frears’ most recent film, Mrs. Henderson Presents. From moment to moment, Frears is in control, but when it comes to a larger structure, his focus is muddled. Despite similar structural problems to Henderson, the Frears film (of the few I’ve seen) that Grifters most resembles is Dirty Pretty Things, a much better movie with a similarly twisted look at what desperation will make people willing to do, especially in an underworld setting. I like the way he’s willing to take a stern look at how smart individuals in impossible situations will make do with their limited options, but I wish he could hone in a little more on some of the essential structural issues that arise when developing a full length feature.