HIGH SOCIETY by Kristian Lin
A PERFECT MURDER is supposedly a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film DIAL M FOR MURDER. In truth, it only uses the setup and a few details from the original. Wealthy financier Steven Taylor (Michael Douglas) discovers that his beauteous and much younger wife Emily (Gwyneth Paltrow) has a lover, so he decides to have her killed. Rather than blackmailing an outside party into doing the job, as in the original, the businessman hires the lover, a con artist posing as a starving artist named David Shaw (Viggo Mortensen). With cold logic, Steven has designed the murder to look like a routine burglary gone wrong, but his intended victim fouls it up by killing the hit man in self-defense.
The movie is no masterpiece, but it's somewhat better than the lukewarm reviews might lead you to believe. The updating has mostly improved on the original film, which just preceded Hitchcock's amazing run of masterpieces, beginning with REAR WINDOW (1954) and ending with PSYCHO (1960), THE BIRDS (1963), or MARNIE (1964), depending on whom you ask. DIAL M FOR MURDER shackles Hitchcock with Frederick Knott's stagey play and the 400-pound immobile camera he had to use to film in 3-D. With its drab color and stiff acting, the only entertainment value in DIAL M FOR MURDER is watching Ray Milland be what Hitchcock unwisely tried to make out of Cary Grant in SUSPICION (1941) - a genteel charmer with an icy murderous side.
Director Andrew Davis is still struggling to regain his form from 1993's THE FUGITIVE. He's so taken with showing us how fabulously rich these people are that his direction skirts the absurd - the Taylors drink out of martini glasses that look like Jacuzzis. Dariusz Wolski's high-contrast photography looks self-important amid Manhattan's jet-set. By contrast, Michael Chapman's cinematography for THE FUGITIVE combined with that movie's Chicago setting to give it a grim elegance. A PERFECT MURDER moves quickly and efficiently, but that only works with the movie's glossiness to make it seem glib and disposable.
The remake does smooth out many of the original's implausibilities. DIAL M FOR MURDER leaves you wondering why the cuckolded husband doesn't simply off the boyfriend and have done with it. Patrick Smith Kelly's script gives him a reason - his business is in trouble and his wife is worth a ton of money to him dead. Viggo Mortensen is preferable to the stodgy and inept Robert Cummings in the original, and David Suchet's basso profundo homicide cop (a rare positive portrayal of an Arab-American in a Hollywood movie) is much weightier than John Williams's fussy Scotland Yard 'tec. Even the remake's disappointingly conventional (and confusing) grappling-for-the-gun ending is better than the tediously anticlimactic walk-through of the failed hit that concludes Hitchcock's movie. The updating, though, doesn't explain why the Taylors don't have an answering machine, which is why Emily has to get out of her bathtub to answer the phone so she can be attacked.
Michael Douglas spins perhaps the cruellest variation yet on his embattled rich white man act. His power-tripping megalomaniac in WALL STREET isn't a killer, while his dangerously out-of-control cop in BASIC INSTINCT is at least more casual in his brutality. The night Emily is supposed to be killed, she pleads with Steven to stay home and obviously wants to admit everything. He gives her a cold stare with a hint of a smile in it as he says, "It's too late." The tightly controlled Douglas is, as one might expect, good at playing a control freak, but you wish he had relaxed a bit and hit the key moments harder, like at the end where he tells Emily, "The only way you leave me is dead."
It's only appropriate that Paltrow plays the Grace Kelly role, because Paltrow essentially is Grace Kelly - a patrician goddess with a sense of fun - but warmer and more vulnerable. That vulnerability, projected through the very Paltrowvian stare that radiates confusion and pain, probably got her cast in this thriller. Like some other tall actresses, she seems apologetic for her height, and here it gives the effect of a 16-year-old dolled up in designer gowns. She looks callow and out of her depth here, but then the character is out of her depth as well. Had the movie been made in 1990, Julia Roberts would have played this part. Roberts is now mature enough to select interesting material on her own, but Paltrow's getting stuck with the boring damsel-in-distress roles. There's every reason to hope that she, too, will overcome Hollywood's typecasting.
Paltrow's presence is enough to provide a rooting interest, but the movie's real problem isn't unsympathetic characters (as some reviewers have said) but a lack of chemistry between any of the leads. The Taylors don't have a believable marriage. Steven knows about the affair and is set on murder from the beginning, while Emily cringes inwardly whenever her husband touches her. Good for the plot, but what brought these people together in the first place? Since Emily comes from money and doesn't need it to marry it, why would she attach herself to a middle-aged sadist, albeit a handsome and well-connected one? You really don't blame her for having an affair, but Mortensen doesn't have the razzle-dazzle of a professional ladies' man, and somehow doesn't strike me as a guy who's dynamite in the sack. It's the shallowness of the movie's personal relationships that make A PERFECT MURDER less than the sum of its parts.
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