To hatch a thief
Entertainment Weekly; New York; Jan 7, 2000; Marc Bernardin.
As an international man of mystery in The Thomas Crown Affair, W Pierce Brosnan follows director John McTiernan's rules of engagement as set up in The
Hunt for Red October and Die Hard. by Marc Bernardin
SO YOU WANT TO BE A master thief? You've heard about the perks-a life of danger, adrenaline, and intrigue; all the money you can spend;
all the freedom you could want; no schedule to keep but your own; no boss; no dress code; no taxes.
But it's not just a matter of wanting, and, unfortunately for those seeking illegal enlightenment, there are no college classes and no
correspondence courses. To gain an insight into what it takes to be one of the rare few who can live life on their own terms, I suggest you look
to the heist films of director John McTiernan: The Thomas Crown Affair, The Hunt for led October (1990, Paramount, 135 mins., PG, also on
DVD), and Die Hard (1988, Fox, 132 mins., R, also on DVD). As one of Hollywood's most respected, intelligent action filmmakershell, for
years every other movie was described as "Die Hard in a... "-he's in a unique position to reveal just what you'll need to be a modern man of
mischief.
* HAVE AN ACCENT It's amazing how much respect people will give you if you've got even a whiff of a foreign demeanor. It works for
Pierce Brosnan in the new-to-video The Thomas Crown Affair. Sure, he's a billionaire financier who can crash the average mortal with his
checkbook, but it's the Irish/British brogue that makes this moonlighting art thief so imposing. Sean Connery speaks with that awesome Sean
Connery accent-which is to say a mumbly Scottish-no matter who he plays, even if it's Marko Ramius, the larcenous Soviet submarine captain
of The Hunt for Red October (he trotted out the same accent for Entrapment, in which he portrayed, yes, an aging master thief). And Die Hard's
Alan Rickman plays Hans Gruber, the rare German pseudo-terrorist with a British lilt. Perhaps it's the nonchalance, the
oh-I'llget-around-to-fleecing-youwhen-I'm-good- and-ready insinuation of a European intonation that makes it the perfect criminal accessory.
* HAVE A -READY WARDROBE Nothing drives cops crazier than a sharp-dressed man. Why? Because they figure that anyone who's got
enough money to have merchants come to his skyscraper and measure him for hand-tailored suits, like Thomas Crown, or who gets his threads
at the same shop where Arafat buys his, like Bans Gruber, would have no reason to commit grand theft anything. Besides, are you gonna detain
Connery when he's wearing that supersuave, jet-black Russian military uniform and his good toupee?
* HAVE A FABULOUS OBJECTIVE If you're going to be a master thief, steal something masterful. Crown had his eye on a $100 million
Monet, while Gruber was willing to kill an office building full of hostages for $640 million in negotiable bearer bonds. Ramius, however, outdoes
them all: He planned to take his own motherland for a billion-dollar Soviet nuclear submarine.
* HAVE A TOPFLIGHT ADVERSARY If, as they say, you can judge a person by his enemies, then you can't really be a class act without a
serious hound on your tail. Who would Robin Hood be without the Sheriff of Nottingham hot on his heels? Of course, Crown made the vital
mistake of falling in love with his pursuer, the smug, fashionable Catherine Banning (Rene Russo), an insurance investigator who shared his love
of the good life. Ramius also found an ally in his adversary Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin), the CIA analyst who sniffed out the renegade sub driver's
daring plan to defect. And then there's John MeClane (Bruce Willis), the testy New York City cop who went and got himself invited to the
Christmas party Gruber decided to crash and burn. Sure, if there were no opponents, a life of crime would be a much easier life indeed, but
there's no fim where there's no chase.
For our nefarious purposes, judging these films was not a matter of weighing cinematic quality but of looking at their usefulness as teaching aids.
Specifically, who got away with it? The Thomas Crown Affair: B+ The Hunt for Red October: A Die Hard: A
From Crown to Crowe
National Review; New York; Aug 30, 1999; John Simon.
WHY was it deemed necessary to remake The Thomas Crown Affair? Because only the basic idea survives in the script by Leslie Dixon and
Kurt Wimmer, it may have been thought that new mediocrity grafted on the old would yield something superior. The millionaire Thomas Crown
has been upgraded to a billionaire (Pierce Brosnan); instead of robbing a bank for fun, he now absconds with a milliondollar Monet from the
Metropolitan Museum to add to his fabulous art collection; and the beautiful insurance investigator (Rene Russo) now has much more explicit
on-screen sex with him than just a suggestive game of chess. But fluff is still fluff.
The highly complicated art theft is reasonably ingeniously written, and tautly directed by John McTieman. But here, too, a couple of obvious
loopholes (briefcases are not allowed into the museum) undercut the excitement. This time the team of robbers is Romanian, but otherwise
conforms to the formula of swarthy faces and arcane lingo. McCann, the police detective in charge (Denis Leary), is obligatorily less acute,
astute, and sophisticated than Catherine Banning, the insurance company's investigator, but is allowed to partially redeem himself in the end. His
obligatory black sidekick is nicely played by Frankie Faison.
Pretty soon it becomes a battle of wits between Thomas and Catherine, which gradually turns from a cat-and-mouse into a bunnies-in-bed
game, filmed with partial frontal nudity for the stars, and total rear nudity for body doubles. Much hyped is Rene Russo's being 45, the nudity of
a mature body presumably guaranteeing mature filmmaking. An added incentive is the lush cinematography, as what is now doubly an affair
progresses to Caribbean locations. Annoying, though, is the cheap trick whereby Catherine becomes jealous of a sultry, slinky blonde who
keeps popping up in Thomas's life (the model Esther Canadas), who, in turn, pouts jealously, although there is eventually a perfectly
harmless-and perfectly improbableexplanation for it all.
Of course, The Thomas Crown Affair is not to be taken seriously for a nanosecond; we are merely supposed to take a bath in luxe and visual
opulence, and bask in the ploys and counterploys as a pair of romantic smoothies inches toward the inevitable supercute ending. Much depends
on the allure of and chemistry between the two stars, neither of whom strikes me as quite right. Brosnan looks a bit too vacuously fashionmodel
pretty, and rings a tad too unresonant. Sean Connery, advanced age notwithstanding, did a similar gig with far more substance and sexiness in
the recent Entrapment.
As for Rene Russo, who indeed was a fashion model, I always found her off-putting. Her angular face, rather foursquare figure, low voice, and
somewhat mannish demeanor-even the masculine name, Rene rather than Renee-had overtones of the transvestite, if not the transsexual. Here
she manages to be a trifle more feminine, and her acting is not bad, yet I can think of many others more suited to the role. At least she is more
appealing than Faye Dunaway, dragged in as an homage to her having played the lead in the 1968 version. She plays Crown's analyst, in getup
and performance as unconvincing as her dialogue. And why would Thomas need a shrink, anyway?
I am by temper disinclined to sympathize with movies of a mystical bent, especially since movie mysticism is several notches below most other
kinds. The unio mystica is imperfectly conveyed by a couple of hours of lurid plotting and sensationalistic images.
But there is that craving in people for more than pragmatic, palpable, everyday reality. Few are untempted by transcorporal, parapsychological,
suprarational images that seem to slake the thirst for metaphysical transcendence. Though alternative worlds are currently favored, even primitive
ghost stories often do the trick. The Sixth Sense, written and directed by the 28-year-old M. Night Shyamalan, is such a one.
Of Indian parentage but growing up in Philadelphia, Shyamalan seems to have received Catholic schooling. I have not seen either his Wide
Awake or his debut feature, Praying with Anger, though that title tickles me. In The Sixth Sense, he tells of Dr. Malcolm Crowe, a happily
married child psychologist. About to cozy up to his wife on the conjugal bed, he is suddenly confronted from the bathroom by Vincent Gray, a
creepylooking former patient whom he apparently badly tailed professionally. In a long-delayed revenge, Gray shoots Crowe, then kills himself.
But Crowe seemingly survives, and the film chronicles his attempt to make posthumous amends to Gray by helping Cole Sear, a deeply troubled
eight-year-old.
Cole, it emerges, can see and hear the dead, who come to him for help or, sometimes, just to scare him, something he dares not confess to
anyone. Some of these are newly dead, others are historic revenants, like the hanged family of three dangling in a doorway. Just why they single
out Cole is left open, but this seems to be a quasi-autobiographical fantasy, and it figures that the dead would seek out a man who is Night to his
friends. M. Night Shyamalan sheds darkness equitably all around; his child hero is Cole (as in coal), his principal adult is Crowe, and his shootist
is (presumably Oxford) Gray.
I must not reveal to you why Crowe and the tormentedly uncommunicative Cole hit it off so well so quickly, the boy previously not opening up
even to his sympathetic, much put-upon mother, who misunderstands his oddness. But the air is rife with misunderstandings, not least those of
the author. Night conceives an award-winning psychologist as someone who is thrown by an elementary Latin phrase (in a Catholic church, Cole
exclaims, De profundis clamo ad te), and who must consult a rather simplistic textbook on child psychology. The idea for the film may have
come to Night from Ambrose Bierce's famous short story "Incident at Owl Creek," or its superb movie version by Robert Enrico, a short film
worth ten full-length efforts such as The Sixth Sense.
There are, however, some extenuating circumstances, chief among them the performance of eleven-year-old Haley Joel Osment as
eight-year-old Cole. The young actor is spookily good, scarily adult for his age, with a face that can seamlessly go from being three years
younger to being as old and tragic as time itself. In fact, Osment reminded me of Little Father Time in Hardy's Jude the Obscure, a child well
beyond precocity, delving into ancient doom. Osment's presence enriches every scene this fully mature actor is in, and doubtless helps elicit a
respectable performance from Bruce Willis as Crowe.
We get high-level work also from the Australian Toni Collette as Cole's mother, and a couple of others. Tak Fujimoto's cinematography is
splendid as always. Philadelphia provides some catchy exteriors, but Fujimoto knows also how to infuse an interior with an eerie glow or,
alternatively, with a succulent, tangible roundedness your taste buds can feel as vividly as your palms. And, for once, even the hokey score by
James Newton Howard works, a phenomenon so rare from this routineer as to seem almost supernatural.
In the, alas, unlikely case that you can catch the Yugoslav film Cabaret Balkan (formerly The Powder Keg), by Goran Paskaljevic, do so. With
implacable honesty, grotesquely comic heightening, commanding direction and performances, it explains more about recent events than all you
have read in the papers or seen on TV.