Don’t ask why, but I’ve been thinking about Belly a lot lately. Yes, it is a charmed life. With every re-watch it becomes eve more apparent that it remains the platonic ideal for what you get when someone who has made their name making music videos moves into directing features. It is wildly ambitious in formal terms, deeply financially irresponsible, and Hype Williams seems to have little to no interest in concepts of narrative coherence or characters whose decisions make sense, jettisoning all such concerns in pursuit of pure sensory excitement. At the other end of the spectrum you have Anton Corbijn. His work as a photographer pushed his video work with the likes of Echo and the Bunnymen and U2 into a world of gloomy grandeur. Yet, bar his debut, Control (a propagandist adaptation of his own photos of Joy Division that brought their doomy weight into motion), he’s an abnormally flat filmmaker, defined by an absence of any sort of essential style at all. It’s perhaps generously reading this anonymity as adaptability that has him helming A Talent for Murder, an adaptation of Joanna Murray-Smith’s play Switzerland, but it’s also this stylistic absence that makes for such an unremarkable film.
In Corbijn’s latest, we’re introduced to the film’s protagonist, novelist Patricia Highsmith (a hissing Helen Mirren, as she sits smoking, drinking, and musing her way into a new idea for a novel. There’s also Edward (Alden Ehrenreich), a young, ambitious editor at a publishing house charged with convincing the increasingly reclusive Highsmith to produce one more Tom Ripley book. On his train from Zurich, he meets Clementine (Olivia Cooke), a fellow American, in Switzerland to visit a rich aunt. When he reaches Highsmith’s house, she is acidic in the extreme, dismissing him and the American literary world he comes representing, and assuring him he’ll be getting nothing from her. Over the day, however, he begins to win her over, and before long they’re spitballing ideas for a new novel, a classic Ripley tale of seduction, money, and murder that we see played out with Ehrenreich and Cooke in its central roles as the lines of various fictions become increasingly blurry.
It’s an interesting idea, and the central pair carry off the double framing device well enough, but there’s something unsatisfying to it all. Much of the film’s screen time asks you to engage in what is ultimately a rather dull homage to Highsmith, a beat by beat replication without the verve or desire to rummage around in real human nastiness that characterizes Highsmith’s work. Ultimately, there passages become too easy to check yourself out of — despite them taking up a solid chunk of the film — as the characters prove difficult to invest much in, too clearly empty shapes hung around jobs and fiscal statuses rather than actual, complex humans. In tandem with Corbijn’s flat, workmanlike direction, it makes for some startlingly forgettable sequences.
Nonetheless, it’s apparent what the goal is: a homage to Highsmith’s work, combined with an exploration of the author’s character in the process. The issue is that A Talent for Murder doesn’t really get to grips with either of them. Mirren embodies a degree of the social angularity that increasingly came to define Highsmith throughout her life, but the script makes it felt in clunky and inorganic ways, her sulkily spitting lines like “Happy people are just people who don’t ask enough questions” like a mard 14-year-old a clear case in point. And the film does this while pulling back from really reckoning with the attitudes that this misanthropy led to, namely intense antisemitism and xenophobia. Realistically, it seems more likely that if a young agent had turned up on her doorstep, he’d get called a slur and told to fuck off back to New York. This shying away from the author’s true-to-life nastiness turns her into a kind of stock character, a curmudgeonly grandma type, and sinks any sense that the film intends to really grapple with Highsmith’s complexities. This lack of genuine darkness infects the narrative, too. Highsmith’s work is reduced to little more than big specs and social climbing. It’s an overall approach that strips the film of any real idiosyncrasy, leaving simply a genre experience in the wake, a hollow film that can only really observe, “Boy, aren’t thrillers good?” Well, unfortunately, not this one.
DIRECTOR: Anton Corbijn; CAST: Helen Mirren, Alden Ehrenreich, Olivia Cooke, Juliet Stevenson, James Faulkner; DISTRIBUTOR: Bleecker Street; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 46 min.
Comments are closed.