The Thomas Crown Affair
Here's another in a long list
of entries this summer that by all rights should be crappy but aren't.
I mean, we have Pierce Brosnan milking his witty sophisticate persona once
again--the man's made a career out of playing the same character.
I'm not kidding: watch Remington Steele, Mrs. Doubtfire,
GoldenEye, and now Thomas Crown. These people are 100%
interchangeable, yet Brosnan manages to remain engaging. We
have Renee Russo playing her hackneyed butch-yet-feminine song again, and
yet she stays watchable throughout. We have a '90's remake of a most
un-'90's celebration of conspicuous consumption and superhuman sex drives
that magically comes across as classy and fresh. What the hell is going
on here?
All I can say is that director
John McTiernan (whom we all know from Die Hard and The Hunt for
Red October) is a black-belt master when it comes to canny audience
manipulation. Where those movies were relentless, crack-fueled thrillfests,
Crown plays more like an elegant game of chess, where the passions
are buried a little deeper below the surface. It's appropriately
electric and thrilling when a theft is in progress, and appropriately lush
and languid when sex is in the air. The mixture of these elements
gives the proceedings an odd, distinctly unique feel, like taking a stimulant
and a depressant within an hour of one another.
The story concerns one Thomas
Crown, a suave financier who is so bored with success that he must resort
to elaborate, costly art heists to lend challenge to his life. His
house is carelessly littered with these treasures. But when he lifts
a Monet from the Met in New York, he finds that the painting's Swiss insurers
have put a hound at his heels, a elegant bulldog of a woman named Catherine
Banning. Not bound by legal procedures--since her aim is solely the
return of the Monet--she begins an ongoing duel with Crown that (is anyone
surprised by this?) culminates in a sexual marathon on a marble staircase
that would leave normal people bloody and broken. Meanwhile, Crown
gives her the obligatory grand tour of costly movie showcases: a plane
ride, a sailboat, a private island in the Caribbean. The movie fairly
drips with unattainable luxury, which once upon a time was the main reason
people went to see movies.
The games they play range from
"drenched in hormones" to "pleasantly cerebral." The script takes
full advantage of the characters' upper-crust breeding, saddling them with
lightning-quick wit and silky diction that'd be impossible to accept as
real dialogue under any conditions but these. Brosnan and Russo handle
everything confidently enough that they end up lending a lot of depth to
their inherently shallow characters.
Special note here should be
made of the music, which is nothing short of miraculous. There are
laid-back jazz themes for the romance that alternate with kick-ass tap-dancing
riffs for the two capers that serve as bookends to the movie. This
is definitely a soundtrack worth buying, and more importantly it fits the
movie's content like a velvet glove, enhancing the overall experience significantly.
This has been a summer of surprises,
but none more unexpected than the enjoyability of The Thomas Crown Affair.
If you need a quick pick-me-up sometime in the next month, you could do
a hell of a lot worse.
The Thomas Crown Affair
THE GOOD: The script is witty and Bronson and
Russo's respective performances give much-needed credibility to their characters.
The music and photography is just gorgeous; buying a ticket to this film
is akin to checking into the Four Seasons for four dollars.
THE BAD: Needless to say, the flick isn't the most
egalitarian thing on the block. As Roger Ebert said, there's something
amiss with the idea that it's less reprehensible for someone to take $100
million if they don't actually need the money. And also needless
to say, there isn't much profundity or lasting value in the goings-on.
BOTTOM LINE: Entertaining as hell if you can check
your hip '90's mentality at the door, and relentlessly well-made to boot.
MY RATING: 80