The
Thomas Crown Affair
Rated R
Opens Friday, Aug. 6.
In 1969, film critic Pauline Kael wrote the essay "Trash,
Art and the Movies," in which she discussed the essential
difference between the enjoyment of film and the appreciation
of film as art. According to Kael, there was an annoying trend
(ideas always seemed more annoying than dangerous to Kael)
among "younger" film-school academics to take movies too seriously,
to assign to certain filmmakers the canonical resonance that
should be reserved for the greatest of composers, authors
and painters. Kael wrote, "If it was priggish for an older
generation of reviewers to be ashamed of what they enjoyed
and to feel they had to be contemptuous of popular entertainment,
it's even more priggish for a new movie generation to be so
proud of what they enjoy that they use their education to
try and place trash within the acceptable academic tradition."
Both points in this superb argument remain relevant, particularly
when pretentious "I-only-watch-OPB" types rattle on about
the evils of Hollywood cinema or another film geek solemnly
discusses semiotics. But Kael went too far when she claimed
Alfred Hitchcock and Josef von Sternberg made pretty trash
and when she cited the artistic poverty in newer movies like
2001: A Space Odyssey, The Graduate, The
Manchurian Candidate and The Thomas Crown Affair.
The 1968 Thomas Crown, directed by Norman Jewison,
is indeed a flashy, beautiful film that utilized super-stylized,
modern '60s visuals like split and boxed screens (the film
almost looks as if it were directed by Saul Bass). But it
has more going on than Kael gave it credit for at the time.
Though she called the film a "good bad movie" that contained
a fine performance by Steve McQueen, she thought it lacked
depth and staying power. She was wrong. The film is still
stylistically exciting, intriguing, mysterious, fun, sexy
and, most importantly, resonant. It is a fascinating allegory
about romantic hoops--the tests of faith that men and women
go through in the game of love. But 30 years later, a remake
has substantiated Kael's words: The Thomas Crown Affair
of 1999 really is "pretty good trash."
Directed by John McTiernan (Die Hard), the movie
updates the 1968 film, with Pierce Brosnan playing the multimillionaire
Thomas Crown. Looking for new excitement, he masterminds
not a bank robbery, like in the original, but the theft
of a Monet from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In comes
Catherine Banning (Rene Russo--no Faye Dunaway by any stretch
of the imagination), a high-powered insurance investigator
who just knows that Crown is the culprit. As in the original,
Banning (Crown's 1968 rival was Dunaway's Vicki Anderson)
uses her feminine wiles to entrap Crown. Their cat-and-mouse
relationship becomes more complicated when Banning begins
to fall for the thief. Will she run away with him or turn
him in? Does he love her, or is this another game to quell
the boredom of a man who has it all? Watching McTiernan's
version, we simply don't care.
Though there are sequences here that are tightly executed
(particularly the final heist), and the score is nice, McTiernan's
forte is not romance. As in the original, it is the "affair"
that becomes the main story and the heist that becomes the
subplot. Yet the romance between Crown and Banning is so
wooden and forced that it at times appears desperate. This
is particularly ao when the film attempts to outdo the original's
genius (yes, Pauline, genius) sequence in which Crown and
Anderson play a game of chess that serves as foreplay to
the most famous scene: a then-shocking open-mouthed screen
kiss. In McTiernan's film, we get Crown and Banning dancing
(horribly) to Latin music, during which Banning rubs her
ass to call attention to the fact that she isn't wearing
any underwear. This leads to the couple furiously screwing
in various rooms of Crown's house and Russo (finally) getting
her breasts out in a motion picture. Watching McQueen (whose
eyes revealed so much of his amazing yet underrated talent)
simply watch Dunaway was immeasurably more erotic than seeing
two rich white people attempting to be hot-blooded Latinos.
It was the matching of wits, the pairing of two amoral,
money-hungry, complex and specifically modern Americans
that made the original so intriguing.
Sadly, there is nothing truly compelling about this contemporary
version. Brosnan, a charming actor, is well cast as a straight,
properly British man of intrigue, but that is the betraying
factor. In the original, it was a stretch for McQueen to
play this high-class huckster, which made his blond, smiling
yet scowly character all the more layered. McQueen subtly
seduced us with corn-fed deception; Brosnan is just British.
He's as disastrously obvious as Russo. Where Dunaway's crooked
smile denoted intelligence, violence and lust, Russo makes
a lot of fuss mugging and prancing around all tough-like;
we don't buy it for a second. She, like the movie, is merely
cute. Though time and a remake (that has Crown swiping art
that is arguable in its mastery) do not change Kael's important
original argument, they do accentuate just how great and,
yes, artistic, the original Thomas Crown is.
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Willamette Week | originally
published August 11,
1999
|
