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Tightly Plotted Thriller, "A Perfect Murder" Filled With Surprises By Bjorn Thomson Savoy Magazine June 5, 1998

A Perfect Murder is a tightly plotted thriller, with more than a few genuine surprises.

Its central characters are three people we wouldn’t want to share an evening with, but who, under pressure, have a certain savage genius that we can’t help but admire. Michael Douglas plays a corporate pirate whose $50 million ship is about to upend, while Gwyneth Paltrow plays his trophy wife, whose most endearing personal attribute is a $100 million trust fund. To give you a hint how the film will progress, the couple has no prenuptial agreement. Theirs is a marriage of inconvenience: Douglas wants Paltrow out of the picture, while Paltrow feels no love for her cold, acquisitive husband. The third corner of this loveless triangle is Viggo Mortensen, a handsome painter who has, unsurprisingly to those who know their genre, a dark past. His job, at least at first, is to console Paltrow during the lonely nights and afternoons when Douglas is busy scrabbling to avoid his creditors.

A Perfect Murder (a remake of the 1954 Hitchcock film Dial M for Murder) sounds like a straightforward genre piece and it is. But it’s a good one, about that very best of thriller scenarios — a group of people locked in the crucible of their own greed, who plan to break the law and get ahead, but fail to take every contingency into consideration. Its predecessors include movies like Blood Simple (1980), or Double Indemnity (1944).

I like these films, which entertain us without heroes or even winners. Much more satisfying than watching a granite-jawed commando subdue a terrorist atop a Harrier Jet is to witness a perfect murder executed with wicked flair. And even more satisfying than watching a perfect murder brought off successfully is to see murder plans go terribly wrong. There’s always a weak link, one variable unaccounted for, a bandaged hand unconvincingly explained, a single footprint. And as the evidence accumulates and gains focus, there is a special pleasure in watching the greedy rodents try to knock each other off before one of them rats out the whole pack.

Director Andrew Davis has little sympathy for his characters. He seems to take a clinical interest, curious as we are exactly how they will break, sure as we are that they will. We feel a kinship with his camera — it seems to take as much pleasure as we do in the grim details.

Like all good thrillers, A Perfect Murder has convincingly oppressive atmosphere. Its world is a frigid, sterile place. The film seems encased in plastic; no human emotion except avarice leaks through to the audience. Every display of passion is an expression either of greed or of  territory threatened. Despite all the sex in the movie, we see little nudity, which fits, since the film is not about sex but ownership of the sexual object.

Though we never grow to like any of the characters, we can’t help but be charmed by Douglas. He plays the reptilian capitalist better than anyone does. As he paces the plush, soundless carpet of his high-rise office, we know he is thinking one of two things a) “Mine!” or b) “How can I make this mine?” And Douglas is a charming villain, capable of a disarming grin when the situation demands, a devastating wit and a certain wobbly vulnerability. He’s also driven by lusts and insecurities we can all understand. The difference is that while we are fuming “I’d like to kill that so and so,” Douglas has already drawn up the battle plan and made discreet inquiries.

Michael Douglas is the man with the plan, and we take almost as much pleasure in its execution as in its inevitable unraveling. Though I didn’t like the character he portrays, I found myself smirking when he pulled off a particularly Machievellian masterstroke. I half hoped Douglas would get away with it. Perhaps more than half.

A Perfect Murder is clearly a vehicle for its charismatic star, and aspires to not much more than to create plausible conditions for his character’s existence. It has big budget stars and a top-flight director, but doesn’t really need those things, as the equally effective, minimal-budget Blood Simple demonstrates. The one thing Blood Simple didn’t have was Michael Douglas, and, as much as I admire the film, it’s all the poorer without him.

Copyright ©1998 Savoy Magazine


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