Colin Firth Career Timeline - APARTMENT ZERO reviews

Donovan reportedly kept the two actors on their toes by working up a bit of business with one of them, then springing it on the other while the cameras were rolling. The minor ad libs and double takes that merged lend the movie an air of spontaneity and unpredictability, yet they're not easy to spot. They're all in character, of a piece, in a movie that's close to perfection. [By John Hart].

From the Washington Post, November 4, 1989:
It's readily apparent that protagonist Adrian LeDuc has ridden more than a mile in Mrs. Bates's wheelchair and that the macabre Apartment Zero shares its Oedipal motivations with Psycho.

Spooky, camp and downright black, this uneven mystery written by Argentine producer-director Martin Donovan and David Koepp is indebted not only to Hitchcock but to Joseph Losey's The Servant and to Neil Simon. They've given us The Oddest Couple in a garish, homoerotic comic thriller for the cult crowd.

Colin Firth and Hart Bochner pair off as the persnickety Adrian and the extroverted American Jack Carney, who has just moved in with the hero, a recluse obliged to take in a boarder when overwhelmed by debt.

Jack, a gallant chameleon, befriends the neighbors -- a boisterous chorus of busybodies -- by giving each what he or she most needs. What with all this going on during a killing spree, we reckon that one of the roomies is the perpetrator. Adrian ignores the gruesome headlines, the radio bulletins, the world in general, to focus on old movies. Hollywood glamour photos are placed around his apartment as though they were portraits of relatives. He wears rose-colored glasses and his neighbors wear blinders -- an obvious reference to those oblivious to the turmoil of the junta. Like The Official Story, but not so sublimely, Apartment Zero warns the Argentine people against selective vision. It adds that killing is not only chronic, but contagious.

The movie, only a second feature for Donovan, is unsettled, but sure of itself. The suspense is sophomoric, but sustained via Firth's performance. He's consistently prissy, potentially unbalanced in this Englishman's take on Tony Perkins. Bochner tends to over-smolder. For that matter, the best moments belong to Smith and Bryan, as terribly terribly British aunties.

A tale with a bitter aftertaste, Apartment Zero is all over the place, capricious and preposterous as the cover of a tabloid newspaper. It gets your attention, makes you laugh and passes the time for a while.

From the Austin American-Statesman 23 Feb 1990:
Apartment Zero ends a bit perfunctorily, and Donovan fails to make a credible case for the apparent mental breakdown of one of his characters. These aren't inconsiderable faults, but one still leaves the theater in a tingle. Donovan owes a lot to Firth for that; his performance as Adrian is vivid and wholly sympathetic. It's a bizarre world that Adrian inhabits, and Firth pulls us in there with him, like it or not. [By Patrick Taggart ]

From the Chicago Sun-Times, 19 Jan 1990: Firth's Adrian is a triumph of sustained skittishness. Though hischaracter denies any resemblance to Felix Unger, the twitching perfectionist of The Odd Couple he more than earns the comparison. Bochner is not a good actor, but his blandness and male-model looks are perfectly suited to his role. Credit also is due Elia Cmiral for his tangy, suggestive score, which adds considerably to the film's distinctive feel.

From the The Dallas Morning News,25 Dec 1989
Quietly ferocious, deliciously baroque - As Adrian, Mr. Firth gives a remarkably concentrated, finely detailed performance. He draws pity -- if not quite affection -- for an emotionally frail character who might otherwise have merited only impatience and contempt.

Mr. Firth does a great deal with his eyes, behind which he reveals a scared, tortured little man wracked with guilt. He makes Adrian seem real -- a specific person -- though the character also plays its part as a symbol in the larger metaphor of Argentina's sordid political history.

Mr. Bochner has fun with the predatory Jack. His TV-smooth, preppy persona is perfect, and the actor is genuinely creepy when he shows us the cracks in Jack's mask. He's smoldering one moment, icy the next, and -- for all his glib charm -- quite demented. [By Russell Smith ]

From the Houston Chronicle, Jan 1990 :
Apartment Zero has a genuine nasty streak, and it's a lot of fun - Colin Firth plays Adrian very much in collaboration with Donovan; underplaying and implying more than he reveals about his character. Hart Bochner plays Jack with the glee and gratitude of an actor being let out of the ``hunk'' box in which American TV producers have placed him. He does this by slipping into subtle self-parody. In Donovan's most colossal tease, there's never an expression of physical or verbal affection between the two men or any discussion of Adrian's sexual history. This is in exchange for one of the most hilarious - and entirely unhomophobic - depictions of repressed homosexuality I've seen in a movie. [By Jeff Millars]

From the Los Angeles Times, 20 Oct 1989:
Unfortunately, the long-winded Apartment Zero is awkward to the point of ludicrousness. Firth has the determination and skill to make Adrian consistently pathetic and believable, but Bochner is allowed to lapse into striking attitudes and poses. British actresses Dora Bryan and Liz Smith play the nosiest of Adrian and Jack's neighbors as caricatures. With its tango-tinged score and moody lighting, Apartment Zero (Times-rated Mature) looks and sounds far better than it is. [By Kevin Thomas]

From the Courier-Journal Louisville, KY, 16 February 1990:
A political subtext adds resonance. Snobbish Adrian, an Argentine native who has lived in England, affects a British accent and pretends he does not speak Spanish. The murders may be the work of a foreign mercenary from the old military regime's "death squads."

Like his protagonist, writer-director Donovan shows enormous affection for film history. Much of the stylish, macabre fun of Apartment Zero lies in its knowing nods to other thrillers -- notably those of Alfred Hitchcock.

Firth, expertly sketching in the details of repressed sexuality and rage, maintains audience sympathy despite Adrian's increasingly bizarre personality. Bochner makes canny use of his TV-actor persona to suggest that Jack's glib, attractive exterior shields all manner of unknowable sins. The effect of their incisive teamwork is quite chilling.

Donovan's screenplay, co-written with David Koepp, might have been brisker in setting up the psychological puzzle and more logical in filling in its details -- especially near the end. Even so, Apartment Zero emerges as a black comedy of unusual audacity - and a thriller of uncommon creepiness.

From the New York Times, October 1989:
The screen credits present ''Apartment Zero'' as ''A Martin Donovan Film,'' which, in this case, means that Mr. Donovan co-produced it and directed it from a screenplay he wrote with David Koepp. Mr. Donovan, the biographical notes state, was born in Argentina and studied film and theater in Europe.

Hart Bochner (Breaking Away) plays Jack, who, as Adrian says at one point, ''has a certain James Dean je ne sais quoi.'' Dialogue like that doesn't grow on trees. It has to be written. Colin Firth, the good English actor (Another Country, A Month in the Country) plays Adrian.

Mr. Donovan also went to the trouble and expense of importing those two fine English character actresses Dora Bryan (A Taste of Honey) and Liz Smith (A Private Function,High Hopes), to appear in what are virtually walk-on roles. It's a wicked waste all round.[By Vincent Canby]

From The San Diego Union-Tribune, 2 Jan 1990
Adrian LeDuc has problems, all right, lots of them. For openers there's his mother, who is rapidly deteriorating in an institution and apparently doesn't like her son much anyhow. This is particularly hard on Adrian (Colin Firth) since he's a devoted and attentive son. Like Norman Bates was. . . Speaking of pressure, Donovan, an Argentinian, likely felt some when he realized he was making a pretty good Hitchcockian thriller at the expense of delivering a political message about repression and brutality and wanton murder. Actually the political message is there from the outset of the movie, but obviously it's not strident enough. So the message is then shrilly delivered. And the movie collapses, the last of the debris being a grotesque and implausible dinner for two. Firth's Adrian makes Felix Unger seem a symbol of machoism, such a fussbudget is he. And lest anyone be unaware of Adrian's repressed sexual leaning, his apartment is dotted with framed pictures of Charles Laughton and Montgomery Clift. And James Dean. [By Bill Hagen]

From The San Francisco Chronicle, 12 Nov 1989:
Not exactly a world-beating thriller, and perhaps too exploitative assuch to carry its load of political criticism easily, Apartment Zero works best as a character study that grows more and more amusingly twisted. As the wildly mismatched Jack and Adrian grow more dependent on one another, they become a sort of bickering married couple - or perhaps a pair of prize horses at a standoff at the stud farm. Bochner snorts and flares his nostrils while Firth (taking his Anglo twit act in last year's A Month in the Country even further) whinnies and prances in protest. Intentionally or not, the erotic tensions between the two actors becomes the film's biggest running gag.

"It's a film about longing," Donovan said during a visit last month. "The inhabitants of the apartment building and Adrian in particular are Argentina," he says - crippled by "a sort of stilted elegance" and its European aspirations, anxious to deny its black recent past and uncertain future.

"They say Argentina is a country of Spanish-speaking Italians who live in French houses and want to be English. It's not a joke. The cultural insecurity there is incredible," he goes on. "If I'd stayed in Argentina myself . . . well, I would have probably died. But I might have escaped inwardly like Adrian, living my life through watching films."

Donovan says the attractive but dangerous Jack stands in for the terrorizing sway both native-born and imported military personnel held in Argentina in the violently troubled years preceding democratization. [By Dennis Harvey]

Apartment Zero won Best Picture honors at film festivals from Seattle to Florida, but in most cities its theatrical release passed with the speed of a subatomic particle. Happily, it's on video now, where it can take its sweet time finding its audience. Besides being a worthy homage to Hitchcock (among others), Apartment Zero is a welcome respite from typical modern thrillers where bad-guy silhouettes pop out at carefully timed intervals to give you a mechanical jolt. Zero is more troubling, because it takes you inside the characters' haunted heads.

The hero is Buenos Aires theater owner Adrian LeDuc. Nobody will come to his highbrow movies and there's no one in his life except his demented mother and his grotesque, silly, sinister fellow apartment-house tenants. He has all the joie de vivre and healthy sexual openness of Tony Perkins in Psycho. Then Adrian meets Jack, a genuine psycho. Everybody loves him because, like any smart bizarro, he brilliantly mimics engaging human behavior. But after taking him in, Adrian begins - despite himself - to take on Jack's evil secret nature

The sketchy plot involves right-wing death squads, but the real point of the piece is the characters' psychic duel, conveyed in a tense style. The camera becomes progressively possessed by Adrian's jittering.

The soundtrack evokes menace. Every move counts. When the apartment denizens circled in the stairwell are shot from below, it's not arty, it's spooky, indicating their role as a geek chorus to a tragedy beyond their knowlege. While every actor scores (including Bochner, whom I always took for a lightweight), it's Firth who scors. The moral transformation in his last scene leaves viewers with a lasting chill. [by Tim Appelo, February 23, 1990]