A
rich man may not get away with murder in The Thomas
Crown Affair, but he gets away with a prank and a
paramour. A remake of Norman Jewison’s 1968 classic film,
this version has more of a James Bond signature than Steve
McQueen provided. A rich financier, Thomas Crown (played this
time by Pierce Brosnan) likes to wager large sums of money
at the golf course and to collect great works of art in the
rest of his spare time. Bored with life and unable to find
any woman worth seeing a second time except for visits with
his psychiatrist (played by Faye Dunaway), he decides to steal
a $100 million Monet, employing at great expense some Eastern
Europeans to provide a diversion while he grabs the painting
and walks out of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Michael McCann (played by Denis Leary) is the detective assigned
to the case, and he is stumped. Where there is a master criminal,
there must be a master detective, and in comes Catherine Banning
(played by Rene Russo), who is sent by the insurance company.
Her fee, if he finds the painting as usual, will be $5 million.
She keeps an apartment in New York City, while detective McCann
confesses that he merely keeps goldfish. Both Thomas and Catherine
are unattached, so they pursue each other around the city,
and he even takes her to his hideaway in Martinique. To feed
the James Bond theme, Catherine falls for Thomas and cries
a few times when she believes that she has lost him. What
will be most intriguing to filmviewers is the lifestyle of
the rich and infamous, whereas the pursuit of the recovery
of the painting is the only thing that holds the sexist girl-chases-boy
plot together. The painting is returned as magically as it
was stolen, and in the end he is seated behind her (coincidentally?)
on an outbound flight to London. Evidently there was a race
to come out with the same story this year, and Entrapment
won, with Sean Connery the first of the James Bonds to steal
art and have the pleasure of being pursued by an attractive
female insurance investigator. Nevertheless, we can be sure
that the disease of boredom, which seems to afflict sexist
narcissistic multimillionaires, requires far more in-depth
psychiatry for Thomas Crown and his ilk. As a critique of
capitalism, The Thomas Crown Affair might be
at the top of the list, but those who can afford admission
to see the film will doubtless be mesmerized rather than scandalized
by all the glamour and glitter. MH
I
want to comment on this film
