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 million-dollar 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 McTiernan. 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 Cañadas), who, in turn, pouts jealously, although there is eventually a perfectly harmless -- and perfectly improbable -- explanation 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 fashion-model 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 Renée -- 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 creepy-looking former patient whom he apparently badly failed 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.
