Sleuth

Back in 1972, Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed a very fine movie version of Anthony Shaffer's clever 1970 play, Sleuth. It concerns a middle-aged mystery writer, Andrew Wyke, whose wife, Maggie, has run off with a young actor and part-time hairdresser, Milo Tindle. Milo shows up at Wyke's Victorian mansion full of weird toys—mostly bizarre, life-size mechanical dolls—to ask Wyke to grant Maggie a divorce. Wyke is fanatically jealous, and proceeds to play nasty games with Milo, whose part-Cockney heritage, in turn, endows him with a shrewdness and rowdiness that may hold their own against the older man's Machiavellianism.

They engage in a no-holds-barred battle. Can savvy Milo extort a divorce from Wyke, or will cunning Wyke avenge his cuckolding by humiliating Milo into retreat with his tail between his legs?

As Shaffer wrote the screenplay too, it was a contest in one-upmanship. Nasty, yes, but also very humorous, and brilliantly acted by Laurence Olivier as Wyke and Michael Caine as Milo. (It had been no less expertly performed onstage by Anthony Quayle and Keith Baxter.) There was so much wit and scintillant language as to make the menace almost dissolve in playfulness. But this softening did not really efface the underlying edge.

Now, however, it occurred to the actor-producer Jude Law to ask Harold Pinter to rewrite Shaffer into something more up-to-date and, given Pinter's proclivities, blacker and more brutal. What has emerged, enhanced by Kenneth Branagh's almost too cannily stylized direction, is a vicious movie, oozing the sort of venom Pinter specializes in.

For, let us not forget, Pinter's trademark is sadism. Not physical torture, to be sure (though some of that too), but mostly mental, psychological torture. Throughout this relatively short movie (86 minutes), the battle of wits in which whichever character has the temporary upper hand usually points a loaded gun at the other, the humor is more ferocious, of a Pinteresque meanspiritedness rather less playful than bestial.

[IMG:R]There are, however, impressive things about the new movie. Instead of grotesquely disquieting automata, Tim Harvey has designed a house that, behind its traditional facade, harbors all sorts of hypermodern gimmickry. There is, as Branagh says, "an Escher quality…staircases leading nowhere, trompe l'oeil doors, lifts appearing out of thin air…every corner offers a surprise." It is all coldly streamlined, mechanized, controlled by remotes, surveillance-oriented like a television studio gone berserk.

You might call the cinematography of Haris Zambarloukos—of course guided by Branagh—postmodern, There are odd, teasing camera angles, cheekily unrealistic lighting, superextreme close-ups whereby only part of a person or a fraction of a face is seen, vastly magnified and in wrenched perspective. Often two faces all but nuzzle each other in spooky joint close-ups; shots are frequently framed so that the bit of a face is studiously off-center, with empty space sinisterly overwhelming it.

Time, too, is toyed with. A brief ride in a cramped internal elevator is stretched way beyond its duration, and light effects surrounding the elevator suggest submersion in shimmering water. Savvy music by Patrick Doyle adds to the tension: a minimalist musical motif, in ominously spare orchestration, is doggedly repeated whenever danger lurks. It is not brash horror-movie music; rather more civilized, it nevertheless manages to bode no good.

Both Michael Caine's Wyke and Jude Law's Milo are masterly performances. There is a heavy-lidded, sarcastic-voiced, oleaginous smugness about Caine, and a faintly hysterical, youthfully preening volatility about Law that artfully collide in continuous reversals of the upper hand. So fraught is the atmosphere that the ring of a cell phone assumes an unearthly penetrancy, some sort of tidings of doom.

There is, however, a serious problem: The whole last part is phony and leads to an illogical ending. I won't give it away, but it is as dishonest as if a sighted person pretended to be blind, or an athlete a wimp, for no other reason than unearned suspense, so that the final, melodramatic reversal should spring on us regardless of how unconvincingly.

Moreover, Pinter has added a quite extensive homosexual element to the proceedings, representing a personal predilection of his that here totally contradicts the heterosexual story line (fight over a woman). Still, not a bad film, but one that made me wish I were seeing the superior 1972 Sleuth, now doubtless to be swallowed up by the baser new one.