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The Good Thief
**1/2
Cinema
Reviews - Week of March 14, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. UK/
France/ Canada/ Ireland. 108 minutes. Written and directed by Neil Jordan.
Starring Nick Nolte, Tcheky Karyo, Said Taghmaoui, Nutsa Kukhiani, Emir
Kusturica, Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Darmon, Marc Lavoine, Mark Polish, Michael
Polish, Ouassini Embarek, Sarah Bridges.
You can't fake self-confidence, but "The
Good Thief" tries so hard to do so that it ends up an endearing movie
as well as a curiously empty one. I mean, you gotta love its effort. When
the mediocre reviews pour in, I suspect that Neil Jordan will be confused:
He's got a film whose tough characters have hidden flaws and weaknesses,
whose look brims with energy and sizzles on the screen, and dammit, Nick
Nolte is here playing a drug addict with weariness of himself, as if the
actor is using a fictional character to redeem his own recent run-ins with
the law. Isn't this the sort of thing that normally gets great notices and
has everybody talking about a career comeback for the star?
Well, yeah, it is, but still. The problem with
the movie is not what it contains, but why. It's hard not to get the feeling
that "The Good Thief" is ticking off a checklist of things that make a deep
and edgy crime pic. All the elements are there, but they don't seem to fit.
Even the central conceit of the plot, spelled out to us in dialogue, ends
up being confusing until the clarification of the final
scenes.
Nolte plays Bob, a former expert thief and gambler
now living a pathetic existence as a heroin-addicted barfly in the south
of France. His nestegg is good enough to get him a decent villa and an eager
young sidekick named Paolo (Said Taghmaoui). The existence of these two guys
is occasionally interrupted by Roger (Tchéky Karyo), a cop who wants
to make sure that Bob isn't planning any new jobs -- he pops up now and again,
making veiled suggestions and bringing up quick parables from past experience,
in the kind of respectful, playful, gamesmanlike way that movie detectives
do when aware they are in high class crime fiction. Also on the sidelines
is Anne (Nutsa Kukhiani), a Russian teenage runaway with a gift for appearing
both helpless and aloof. She embodies seeming sexy, provocative and a danger
to herself -- Paolo falls in a pathetic kind of love with her, which she
reciprocates with sex but not affection, and Bob tries to do as much as he
can to act like a father figure.
After a few stretches of hanging around with the
characters and absorbing the cinematically stylish version of their seedy
atmosphere, the plot gets in motion: Bob has a plan to rob a Monte Carlo
casino, but he's gonna allow leaks from the gang to the cops, because of
something to do with a bluff operation involving the safe and some fake paintings
and real paintings being somewhere else... or something. A speech near the
beginning of the movie explains it all in detail, but the plan is still
impossible to follow -- the ending makes the beauty of it clear, and brings
a smile to the face, and then the details have faded five minutes after you've
left the cinema. Yeah, it's one of those.
Neither me nor my companion were sure if the story
was supposed to be confusing, and reveal itself late on, or whether the movie
was spelling out its convolutions early in the running time so it could get
the details out of the way and concentrate on character development and ambience.
It doesn't really matter, because "The Good Thief" has bigger problems. The
look of the thing is awash in vibrant neon colour, with shadows all around
it. It moves at a fast pace, there are sleek camera moves, and the technical
flourishes include occasional freeze-frames at the ends of certain scenes,
just to give us a little jolt. Even the credits scream invention and hipness
-- they're bright white letters, thin and rough, quivering a little with
a mood of anticipation. All of this is pleasing, until we wonder why it's
being employed. The techniques play like a sideshow, with many cute devices
used in throwaway moments, and none for storytelling.
The dialogue snaps and dances, expresses cynical
attitudes and trails off into pearls of wisdom and snippets of challenge
-- you can feel it straining to capture film noir essence and be memorable,
but friends, I confess that I cannot remember a single line. Even as window
dressing, it would be fun, if Jordan had cast the right actors. But Taghmaoui
and Kukhiani, for all their presence, end up mumbling their passages, and
give the impression of Europeans who would be comfortable making points with
basic English. Their lines seem imposed by filmmakers, and more than anything
else, the speech in the movie tips us off to how hard "The Good Thief" is
trying to be something it is not.
Film scholars of inordinate dedication will have
noticed that the situation and characters have been heavily inspired by "Bob
le Flambeur", a highly acclaimed Jean-Pierre Melville movie from 1955. The
more I read about that film, the more "The Good Thief" sounds like a close
remake, and the more I want to see the original. French cinema of that period
used wit and new approaches in style in order to worship familiar movie images
while creating a feeling of breaking free from the methodical. "The Good
Thief" is conscious of the fact that it is a movie, and is jazzed about its
own technique, but that's not quite the same, now is it?
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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