The Michael Douglas Fan Page
FILM REVIEWS
"A Perfect Murder": It's a
Local thing
By William P. Coleman.
Reviews and Reflections on Film
Wealthy Emily Bradford works at the US mission to the United Nations. Her husband, Steven Taylor, is an international financier. Emily has been having an affair with struggling artist David Shaw. Unbeknownst to her, Steven has found out about them, and also found out that David is a con man with a record of swindling wealthy women. On the pretext of looking at David's paintings, Steven visits his loft and makes him an unusual proposition: would David like to make $500,000 for murdering Emily? Or else, would he prefer to be exposed to the police?
A Perfect Murder is based on Frederick Knott's play Dial M for Murder, used by Alfred Hitchcock as the basis for his 1954 film with Grace Kelly, Ray Milland and Robert Cummings. I prefer to regard A Perfect Murder as a different film, while enjoying the fun of seeing how the basic situations and props—the phone call, the telephone, the scissors, the latchkey—will be reinterpreted.
Early on, Emily warns David that he doesn't want to tangle with Steven. Indeed, the viewer doesn't have to see much of Steven before concluding the same thing. Michael Douglas makes him very formidable. He's intelligent and ruthless, a man who's completely capable of using the resources given him by his wealth.
David's personality is complex. The part of him that Emily sees, the handsome and loving young artist, is not entirely a put-on; it's built out of material that he really has inside of him. Predominant, though, is the part of him that Steven sees. His personality has much of the raw material that would make him a worthy antagonist for Steven, but he doesn't have enough, or know how to use it well enough, to play in Steven's league. He's just a small-time con man with a lot of talent.
Viewers who have seen Viggo Mortensen in G.I. Jane and can compare his work as Master Chief Urgayle with his work here will be impressed by the considerable acting ability that he has used in both of these roles. One is also impressed by Mortensen's integrity: that he is willing here to portray a character so tawdry without occasionally peeking out to reassure us that he's really a cool actor.
Emily's part never came together for me. Her surface manner is that of a shy woman, a confirmed victim, who happens to have been born into great wealth. At times she shows herself as a loser, and at other times she demonstrates real aggressiveness and she wins. I never felt her emerge as a single human being, rather that she was a collage of external characteristics that the movie needed her to have. I thought that the fault was in the script rather than in Gwyneth Paltrow's acting.
A Perfect Murder is intended to have a lot of impressiveness and glamour, and this is one way of making an enjoyable movie. Mostly, it succeeds. However, it is counterproductive that two of its three main characters are designed to appear as nonentities most of the time.
In the Hitchcock film, John Williams gave a fine performance as Inspector Hubbard, who sees behind the surface and solves the enigmatic crime that Hitchcock presented. In this film, David Suchet's performance as Detective Karaman is also a treat. Suchet conveys powerful, probing intelligence combined with emotional warmth. The difference between the two characters illustrates the difference between the eras in which the two movies were made. Unfortunately, Detective Karaman has only a simple part in this simplified version of the film. I would have wished for more.
Considered as a contemporary 8-Plex movie, A Perfect Murder is distinctly above average. I enjoyed it. Could it have been even better? In Dial M for Murder, the plot is an organizing principle. Each character and each incident has its own differentiated place within a whole, to which it gives meaning and also takes it back. At the end we don't just get the solution to the puzzle, we get a final step that shows the film as a superbly elegant proof of a theorem, bringing everything together, intellectually and emotionally, and satisfying the viewer.
In contrast, A Perfect Murder is local: everything is sacrificed to making each
individual scene as impressive as possible at the time that it's running. These scenes
just bump along one after another. They're very good, but they could be better if they
supported each other more.