LOST IN TRANSLATION
Hollywood takes a great foreign film, casts it with big stars — and makes a flop
HOLLyWOOD does not have a particularly distinguished record of remaking foreignlanguage films. For every improvement on the original there are a dozen misfires, and Secret In Their Eyes, despite a splendid cast, is the latest of them. It updates the brilliant 2009 thriller El Secreto De Sus Ojos — which was partly set amid the political convulsions of Seventies Argentina and deservedly won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film — to modern-day Los Angeles.
Chiwetel Ejiofor — last seen as a corrupt cop in the incoherent Triple 9, another movie which failed to make the most of a fine cast — this time embodies a kind of pained nobility as Ray, a former FBI man who is still nursing an obsession hatched 13 years earlier.
In 2002, Ray was seconded to an antiterrorism task force set up in the wake of 9/11. A series of extended flashbacks takes us back to a time when LA seemed likely, if only to a task force set up on that presumption, to be the next terrorist target.
RAy’Stask force colleagues included Jess ( Julia Roberts) and Claire (Nicole Kidman), whose engagement to a wealthy financier did not stop Ray from forming an instant crush on her, nor her from smouldering in his manly presence like a day-old bonfire.
But then came a terrible distraction from this burgeoning filing- cabinet romance. Jess’s daughter was found raped and murdered, and the prime suspect turned out to be a creep called Marzin (nicely played by young British actor Joe Cole).
Unfortunately, he also happened to be the task force’s most useful informant in its bid to crack a terrorist cell, and was duly protected by the ambitious district attorney (Alfred Molina).
For 13 years, Ray has tried to find Marzin. Now he thinks he has finally located him, and returns to LA to persuade Claire, now the high-flying DA herself, to re-open the case.
Writer-director Billy Ray handles the toing and froing in time well enough, with great help from his hair-and-beard co- ordinator and strong performances from his leads.
Ejiofor is terrific, as is Roberts. Largely devoid of make-up, her usual luminosity dimmed in a way that would have been unthinkable to Hollywood movie stars of old, she acts up a storm as a bereaved mother.
There’s solid support, too, from a pair of fine actors better-known for their work on the small screen, Michael Kelly (House Of Cards) and Dean Norris (Breaking Bad). And it’s always nice to see a smouldering Kidman.
But there are major flaws. Above all, Ejiofor’s Ray, for whom we are expected to root both in his determination to bring Marzin to book and Claire to bed, doesn’t seem very good at his job.
In fact, without wanting to issue any spoilers, the entire plot is underpinned by some basic incompetence on his part, and for all the clever detective work that leads him to the bad guy, he never quite manages to anticipate that the rascally fellow might just, erm, run away.
I didn’t wholly buy into Ray’s relationship with Claire, either. And there are further problems created by the feverish Americanisation of the story. When
Ray looks for his quarry at an LA Dodgers baseball game, there’s nothing like the heartstopping tension of the scene on which it is based, at a football match in Buenos Aires.
So on the whole there are more reasons not to see this film than there are to see it. The Argentinian original is massively superior, but this is not without its virtues. THE same cannot be said of
The Benefactor. Unless you are slavishly devoted to the works of Richard Gere (and hard as it is to comprehend, such people exist), I can find no reason to sit through even a relatively modest running time of 90 minutes.
GERE plays a charismatic philanthropist called Franny, whose extraordinary wealth, rather like that of Jamie Dornan’s Christian in the dreaded Fifty Shades Of Grey, is never explained.
Writer-director Andrew Renzi’s drearily unengaging film — not quite a thriller, not quite a melodrama, not quite anything much — starts with Franny accidentally causing the death of his best friends, a married couple.
When we meet him again, five years on, he is a Howard Hughesstyle recluse burdened with guilt and far too much hair.
So when his deceased pals’ daughter (Dakota Fanning) comes back into his life, he finds a job for her new husband (Theo James), trims his beard and starts behaving like a souped-up sugar daddy. As usual, Gere either over-acts or under-acts, never really making Franny believable, except as an annoying, borderline creep, although in mitigation he is lumbered with a quite remarkably silly script.
Why Renzi decided to give Fanning’s character the nickname Poodles, I cannot say.
Whatever, Gere’s finest achievement in this film is keeping a straight face while uttering lines such as: ‘I did this for Poodles’, and, my favourite: ‘Not everyone can have a Poodles, my friend.’