Phillim
Stephen Frears makes smart movies, icydk. This is a 'best work' film for its featured players, young and old: John Cusack, Angelica Huston, Annette Bening, Pat Hingle -- and icon Henry Jones as the quintessential night clerk. Old-timey feel, modern look. Human viciousness codified in rules of 'the grift' -- con artistry. Acquiescence to quiet violences a given along the way. The camera watches, unflinchingly. Comic and disturbing, and instructional.From a 1963 novel about a 25-year-old man by a then-57-year-old author -- so from a sensibility formed by the 1920s, 30s, 40s . . . peppered with lots of quaint jargon, plausibly spoken by fine actors in a modern setting. I kept thinking of Edward Hopper's 1942 painting 'Nighthawks', as if the denizens of Hopper's all-night diner left in cars with automatic transmissions and drove to hotel rooms to watch remote-controlled cable TV.Fascinating machine of a plot compels audience engagement, thus sustains low-key *natural* behaviors of actors playing con artists -- experts at blending in. Subtle work, restraint, discipline. Young actors should watch and learn.
gavin6942
A small-time conman (John Cusack) has torn loyalties between his estranged mother (Anjelica Huston) and new girlfriend (Annette Bening) -- both of whom are high-stakes grifters with their own angles to play.This is an interesting part of John Cusack's career. Not quite an adult, but not quite a kid. He fluctuates between both rather well. He could be 18 or 30, but which is it? He had wanted to make this film "since high school", but when was that? Nothing better than a story of three confidence artists all trying to scam each other. Especially if their motives do not really become clear until we start seeing all the pieces. Not sure the $20 Miller trick really works, though. You would think a cashier / bartender would look before making change.
dvc5159
This is one mean movie. It seduces, wraps your arms around you, and they guts you and leaves you stunned. Directed with striking precision and focus by Stephen Frears ("Philomena", "The Queen"), and written by Donald E. Westlake, one of the literary princes of crime fiction, and based off pulp author Jim Thompson's pulpy novel, in a manner so intricate with detail, so hardboiled that it cracks under the weight of each step it takes, one twist of the knife after another.It's all too good to be true for this neo-noir, even when Martin Scorsese's producing it. Then comes the actors – and my word, are they fantastic in their roles – John Cusack is sly yet undeterred in a role that is a slightly more edgier variation on Humphrey Bogart, with a cross of Lee Marvin, to boot; Annette Bening is simply drop-dead sexy as the woman who thinks she knows it all, yet is a timebomb waiting to explode. The real star of the show is Angelica Huston in a well-deserved Oscar nominated performance, perfectly balancing the ruthless, desperate act with a honest, focused, motherly concern that doesn't feel cliché at all.Who knew modern day, sunny Los Angeles and Phoenix can be the backdrop of so seedy a neo-noir, perhaps the best since Chinatown? Frears, Huston, Cusack, Bening, Westlake, cinematographer Oliver Stapleton and composer Elmer Bernstein deserve all the praise they can get for creating something so seedy yet starkly beautiful in retrospect.
gelman@attglobal.net
Despite all the talent involved -- Huston, Cusack, Bening, Frears and Scorcese -- I was neither engaged nor satisfied with "The Grifters." My wife and I have regularly enjoyed movies about elaborate con jobs. But there's nothing terribly clever about the ways that Huston, Cusak and Bening ply their cheating. Their characters are disagreeable individuals and what happens to them is off-putting and ultimately very bloody. Bening and, especially, Huston turn in pretty good performances but I've never much liked Cusack, and there's nothing in this film to improve his standing as far as I'm concerned. The three of us watching the film on streaming video uttered a collective "yccch" when it ended.
AD
