A Swank Affair
Reviewing The Affair of the Necklace.

Mr. Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post.
December 1-2, 2001

movie set in pre-Revolutionary France starring Oscar-winner Hilary Swank about a conspiracy involving an insanely grand piece of jewelry and Marie Antoinette? The Affair of the Necklace sounded so unusual, especially for a Hollywood movie, that I was sure it was going to be good. Hard to believe that a studio would give the green light unless the script were really something special.

It turns out that the script by John Sweet is indeed something special — I'd say it was the worst piece of dreck this year were it not for Randall Wallace's Pearl Harbor, which was the worst screenplay in the entire history of this planet. In the first half hour, the movie replays and recapitulates its own set-up no fewer than six times. A young noblewoman wants to reestablish her claim over the family land. Her father, who spoke against the crown, was murdered when she was a child, and getting the house back is the focus of her life.

We see Hilary Swank telling the judges in a courtroom that she wants her house back. We see her telling a guy she meets at court that she wants her house back. We see a flashback to the time her father was killed and she lost the house. We see her trying to get close enough to Marie Antoinette so that the queen will intercede and get her the house back. We see her talking to a court official about getting her house back.

Finally Hilary figures it out: She's not going to get her house back.

Awwwwww.

Having spent so much energy on the stupid house, director Charles Shyer finds it impossible to make at all clear the conspiracy Hilary designs to bilk money from a Catholic bishop to buy her house back. Christopher Walken is involved, in ways that defy reason, as Count Cagliostro, the famous hypnotist. Walken gives the movie a tiny bit of zest, which The Affair of the Necklace needs the way a human being needs air.

Shyer's best-known previous film was Father of the Bride, a nice movie that took its look and emotional resonance from the kinds of heartwarming commercials made by McDonald's. Shyer decides to use a different kind of commercial as his model here. The Affair of the Necklace resembles nothing so much as an ad for I Can't Believe It's Not Butter — you know, the ones starring Fabio and a mouth-breathing chick excited beyond measure about how good the faux-butter is.

Those commercials are supposed to be funny. The Affair of the Necklace barely even has a single joke in it. And of course, being set in the 18th century, nobody uses contractions and everybody uses lots of polysyllabic words that Swank and her fellow cast-members seem to have learned phonetically. How else to explain the terrified looks on their faces as they try to pronounce "assignation" and "ameliorate"?

The late Huw Wheldon, who ran the BBC during its most glorious years in the 1960s and 1970s, said there were two kinds of movies that gave him the giggles. There's the type in which a housekeeper in 18th-century Austria runs into the parlor and declares: "Excuse me, mum, but there's a fellow at the back door who says his name's Beethoven!"

In the second type, a man in the vestments of a 17th-century French nobleman turns to another actor and says in an unmistakably midwestern accent: "Cardinal Richeloo will be angered at word of this!"

Hilary Swank and Co. pronounce "Richelieu" even worse than that guy did.

How did The Affair of the Necklace get made? Why did it get made? It has no stars. Its director is a second-ranker in Hollywood. Its screenwriter is a nobody. Its production company's best-known previous film is Dude, Where's My Car?

The story behind the making of The Affair of the Necklace would be full of intrigue and greed and foolishness and guile and heartbreak — which is what The Affair of the Necklace is supposed to be full of. Instead, it's entirely full of something else.