"Trashy but potent" is how dark prince of Wall Street Steven
Taylor (Michael Douglas) describes the canvases of sexy,
enigmatic artist David Shaw (Viggo Mortensen). "A Perfect
Murder," the film they inhabit, tries hard to live up to that
description, but the effort is too much to sustain.
Handsomely mounted and richly melodramatic, "A Perfect
Murder" benefits from the gift director Andrew Davis ("The
Fugitive") has for adding intelligence to pulp shockers. And being
based on the play that became Alfred Hitchcock's "Dial M for
Murder" gives the film an impressive pedigree.
But in their zeal to "contemporize" that story, to drag it into the
anything-goes '90s, the producers and screenwriter Patrick Smith
Kelly have changed the moral balance of the picture in a way that
hampers audience satisfaction. "A Perfect Murder" begins better
than it ends, and the pleasures it offers turn out to be more of a
transitory nature.
One of the treats of "A Perfect Murder" is the good, disreputable
fun that's been had in typecasting the film's leads, starting with
Douglas as the scheming commodities trader who asks questions
like "What's our exposure?" and is never ever happy with the
answers.
Steven Taylor is essentially a juicy reprise of "Wall Street's"
Gordon Gekko for Douglas. In "Perfect Murder" he looks more
powerfully reptilian than ever, with a trace of the undead Count
Yorga, Vampire, thrown in for variety. Few actors are as
well-suited for making these preposterously amoral captains of
industry plausible, or have quite Douglas' way with lines like "I've
always thought 'bludgeon' has a spur of the moment sound."
Mortensen, though less well known than Douglas, is similarly and
expertly cast to type as a character not likely to be mistaken for
Jimmy Stewart. Mortensen's Shaw is a sexually charged artist with
a studio in Brooklyn who allows paint to stain his hands but never
the sheets of his rarely empty bed.
What these two men have in common is a passion for Emily
Bradford Taylor, the wife of one and the mistress of the other. A
blond heiress with a hefty trust fund (Grace Kelly played the part in
the Hitchcock version), Emily has the kind of job assisting the
American ambassador to the United Nations that allows her to
take extended amorous lunches at Shaw's quintessentially
bohemian studio.
When Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays the role with the appropriate
aristocratic sheen, first came to notice with a galvanizing
performance as a raw, unpredictable young woman in "Flesh and
Bone," it would have been difficult to predict her current
incarnation as the studio's favorite icy blond object of desire; the
ways of Hollywood are murky indeed.
Once again, as in "Great Expectations," Paltrow in effect plays the
virgin imprisoned in the tower, a poor little rich girl desperately in
need of rescuing, though the '90s being what they are even virgins
are more sexually active than they used to be.
"A Perfect Murder" begins with Emily in bed with David,
desperately in love and starting to want to get out of her marriage.
The question the film posits is how much does husband Steven
know and, given that it's inevitable that he find out, what's he going
to do about it.
"A Perfect Murder" looks great as photographed by Darius
Wolski, and the spectacular Fifth Avenue apartment created by
production designer Philip Rosenberg, art director Patricia
Woodbridge and set decorator Debra Schutt on an
11,000-square-foot set in Jersey City will have New Yorkers
weeping in envy. But the way the critical plot questions are
resolved is acceptable but nowhere near as memorable.
For, paradoxically, once everyone's cards are on the table the
film's tensions lessen, not increase. Partly it's because the
characters' amorality becomes too predictable, and partly it's
because Paltrow's character, the one we end up caring about
most, is also the film's least developed.
Emily does speak at least two foreign languages fluently (including
Arabic with a somber detective played by David Suchet), and has
aristocratic Constance Towers (in a far cry from the roles she
played for Sam Fuller) for a mother. But she seems to have
interested the filmmakers more as a construct than a character.
When she tells a friend that she's thinking of leaving Steven
because "he has no real idea who I am," it's easier to sympathize
with the in-the-dark husband than it should be.
* MPAA rating: R for violence, sexuality and language. Times
guidelines: sexual encounters and acts of violence.