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Twilight
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Robert
Benton's Twilight nudges an audience
to gently realign its generic expectations in regards to a modern day, private
eye mystery set in
Los Angeles.
It
is not a grand-slam piece like L.A.
Confidential (1997), covering a vast fresco of social vices and corruption.
Its star power – Paul Newman, Gene Hackman, Susan Sarandon – is deliberately underplayed.
Benton
takes the logic and mood
of Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown (1997) to a further extreme. For this
is a story geared to its characters – their age, rhythm and reflectiveness. Not
since Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder
Mystery (1993) have we had the thrill of seeing a movie that
so delights in showing the vicissitudes of desire, deceit and murder
among a bunch of people well into their advanced years.
This
is a modest, even slight movie. The story never moves beyond a small circle of
old acquaintances: Harry (Newman), a mournful ex-cop and private eye; his boss
and card-playing friend Jack (Hackman), facing the prospect of slow death;
Jack's wife Catherine (Sarandon), once a sultry movie star; and a group of
Harry's longtime companions in the law enforcement business, including faithful
Raymond (James Garner) and feisty Verna (Stockard Channing).
Everywhere
Harry goes he stumbles upon a dead body that serves mainly to stir some ghost
from the past – and incite some transgression in the present. The movie's
themes are embodied in low-key interactions rather than emblazoned in dialogue:
loyalty, class difference, self-knowledge. A scene in
which Harry accuses Catherine of an excessively materialist attachment to
'things' – and she responds by showing just what she thinks of her daily world
– is indelible.
Strangely,
the contemporaneous film with which Twilight has most in common is the dreadful The Big Lebowski (1998). Both partake of the
splintered, melancholic mood of late Chandler (The Long Goodbye), both display a heightened feel for architecture
and landscape, and both indulge in an odd comedy about the hero's castration
anxieties. But
His
film is finely-crafted to a fault, classical and self-effacing in the best
sense. It offers the joys of an observational style: insight into complex
characters, the precise mood of a time and place, a gradually unfolding
intrigue dedicated to the unfathomable mysteries of heart and mind. The dead
opposite of a spectacular, Twilight will satisfy those who can gladly attune themselves to the novelistic
subtleties of psychological mystery-thriller fiction.
© Adrian Martin May 1998 |
