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I'd seen the trailer recently, thinking it looked like an intriguing suspense thriller and then, along with everyone in my audience, being jolted by the credit "Written & Directed by Woody Allen." I went to see it yesterday with no further knowledge of the film or of any critical response from any source. At the end, I turned to my date and said, "I feel like I just held my breath for two hours." Her response was almost identical.
It's a thriller. It's a suspense movie. I suppose there's a laugh or two buried in it somewhere, but this ain't your father's Woody Allen movie. While there are elements of the premise that I found not entirely comfortable buying into, taken as a whole this is one of the best suspense films I've ever seen.
Colin Farrell (whom I've always liked, here in a performance light years better than anything I've seen him do before) and Ewan McGregor are brothers, blue-collar types with high aspirations to something better than their current respective jobs, working in a garage and in their father's failing restaurant. Terry (Farrell) has a gambling problem and Ian (McGregor) is afraid his new girlfriend is going to find out he's not the toff he pretends to be. Both of them suddenly find themselves desperate for money, with no place to turn. That is, until their rich uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson) shows up unexpectedly. They lay out their stories to Uncle Howard and beg him to get them off their respective hooks. He seems willing, but he's got a favor to ask in return.
That favor catapults the two brothers into a nightmare, and it launches the audience into a thriller which, for all its stretching of credulity in certain areas, is the most believable one I've ever seen, I think. I kept thinking, "This is probably how real people would act if they found themselves in this situation." The difficulty I have with it is that there are certain decisions that I found highly possible but not necessarily the most likely. But the characters' responses to their situations seemed at times almost documentary in nature.
I cannot compliment too highly Colin Farrell. Far more than McGregor, he made me feel I was watching a real, live person reacting to real, live circumstances. It's one of the most naturalistic and believable performances I've seen in a very long time, and my appreciation of him as an actor has soared. McGregor, on the other hand, while perfectly adequate and able, I suppose, seemed not really to inhabit the world he moved in. It's not a bad performance at all. It's simply that, next to what Farrell was doing, and what John Benfield and Clare Higgins were doing as the boys' parents, it seemed less real to me. I also very much liked Sally Hawkins, a sort of Scarlett Johannsen lookalike, who plays Farrell's girlfriend. Like the others, she seemed to really live the life she was portraying.
Woody Allen. Wow. This is a film I'd never have expected from him. What a revelation. I like this film as much as any of my favorite Hitchcocks (though that's faint praise from me, since Hitchcock leaves me appreciative rather than delirious with pleasure). As an intellectual and emotional experience, Woody Allen's film, I'd have to say, has out-Hitchcocked the "master of suspense."
score 10/10
JimB-4 25 January 2008
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1807408/ |
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1-4-2021 04:53:34