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Loading ...If you enjoy seeing Michael Caine and Jude Law in a clever one-act play, wouldn’t you enjoy seeing them do it three times in a row? If you answer yes, “Sleuth” should delight you. Based on the 1972 Tony-winning play by Anthony Shaffer, it gives us
Caine as a wealthy mystery novelist fond of sadistic mind games, and Law as his wife’s lover, a weak-willed but resourcefulactor.With its rigidly theatrical three-act structure, the film operates as a series of variations on themes of deception,domination and manipulation.
The men meet at Caine’s country manor to discuss his reluctance to divorce his unfaithful wife (he wants to deny her a sizable settlement). The meeting begins as a witty battle of wills over the woman Caine doesn’t want,but doesn’t want to let go, then deepens into a primal struggle of experience and guile against youthful energy — which would be fine, except for the structural problem of showing us the same struggle three times over.
The opening is the film’s strongest sequence, as Law comes to visit the estate. Caine disparages him before he crosses the threshold, taunting him about the size of his little runabout parked beside his own jumbo luxury sedan. Inside, we see a great visual joke. The Tudor manor has been gutted and redecorated by Caine’s wife to look like a disco. We can see why the marriage didn’t work out.
Caine pummels Law’s ego with the verbal dexterity of Lennox Lewis working the speed bag, talking him into a scheme that will benefit them both. Law will pretend to burglarize the house, steal the wife’s jewels and sell them to a crooked diamond merchant Caine knows in Amsterdam. Law gets the money and gets to keep the troublesome woman, Caine gets the insurance money and all’s well that ends well — except that the story is just beginning.
“Sleuth” is constructed around a series of clever but improbable plot twists that would work better in the theater’s realm of artifice and suspended disbelief than on the movie screen, where realism rules. The manor house where the action unfolds feels like a stage set, and the bantering dialogue is the sort of heightened diction that functions better under a proscenium arch. Harold Pinter touched up Shaffer’s play for this remake (he added a great joke for Law, who played Caine’s “Alfie” character a few years back), but didn’t move it in the direction of naturalism.
Director Kenneth Branagh films the proceedings in immense closeups, and there’s great pleasure in seeing two terrific actors in almost microscopic detail. Caine (who played the younger man in the original film 35 years ago) is such a consummate performer that he can convey emotion with a twitch of the bags beneath his eyes. Law isn’t at that level, but he’s certainly attractive enough to observe at close range.
This would have been a memorable night at the theater. Too bad they filmed it.
Tags: film, Sleuth
