Obsessive, haunting eye-opener
New on circuit: SECRET IN THEIR EYES Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts, Dean Norris, Alfred Molina Director: Billy Ray Rating: ★★★★✩ Jess meet as young hotshots on an anti-terrorism task force in Los Angeles. It’s a mere four months after the September 11, 2011 attacks and anchoring his drama in this high-strung moment is film-maker Ray’s shrewdest decision.
Where Campanella evoked Argentina’s so-called Dirty War against leftists and its effect on dayto-day law enforcement, Ray effectively conjures an atmosphere of paranoia that will be familiar to many viewers. The certainty that Los Angeles would be the next target of terrorist violence was all but palpable in early 2002.
Roberts’s Jess, the embodiment of accusatory grief, can only circle the investigation of her daughter’s murder. Because the body’s found near a mosque that’s under surveillance, the case involves Kasten and Claire. The attraction between these two, the impassioned working-class detective and icy Harvard beauty, is more manufactured by plot than fully felt, but that’s less of a problem than it might be; the characters’ unspoken romantic feelings aren’t pivotal here, as they are in the Argentinian feature. More essential is the way Claire and Kasten are affected when their probe proves to have been in vain, despite the overwhelming evidence against their suspect (Joe Cole).
Evidence isn’t enough because their suspect is a prized federal informer, protected by task force chief Morales (Alfred Molina), single-minded to the point of outright criminality, and his surly cohort (Michael Kelly). Morales, who has no time for lowly murder cases when he sees a sleeper cell within reach, is a character who, in some of the film’s most heavy- handed sequences, hits the nail too squarely on the head.
But Ray and his designers build a subtler, more convincing picture through background detail: the installation of closed-circuit cameras on the streets, the proliferation of flag pins on the lapels of government employees. From the opening moments in a late-night office to the chilling denouement in the suburbs, lived-in design elements enrich the characterisations, and the trauma of one time period bleeds into the another. The second, 13 years later, finds the central trio all profoundly changed by the aborted probe.
Kasten is no longer with the FBI, but has not forsaken the cold case, the movie gradually revealing the reasons for his extraordinary resolve. Claire, now district attorney and even frostier, is reluctant to reopen the files when he presents new information, while the formerly feisty Jess has become a wraith with dulled eyes, and uninterested in digging up the past.
The cinematographer, Daniel Moder, may be Roberts’s husband, but he affords her no specialtreatment lighting or lens work for her portrayal of a character that is the antithesis of vanity.
As Ray and editor Jim Page shift the narrative back and forth between past and present, the actors deftly embody the toll of time.
It’s the difference between youthful idealism and middle-age pragmatism, to the nth degree.
For Ejiofor and Roberts’s characters, the passage of those 13 years can be read in the weight of gravity on their faces. In pitch-perfect contrast, the facial features of Kidman’s Claire, a rising star who is circumspect and politic, have a gravity-defying, masklike containment. Even when exposing Claire’s deeper feelings, Kidman maintains a suitably cool affect.
For his part, Ejiofor persuasively navigates his high-energy character’s balancing act between guilt and duty. But it’s Roberts’s Jess, with her unwieldy pain, who holds the centre of this crime drama, the suspense churning around her as one character after another devises ways to cross lines and break rules.
From City Hall to a chop shop on the fringes of downtown, the use of Los Angeles locations is especially astute, with the Santa Anita racetrack and Dodger Stadium providing terrific colour and texture in two set-piece sequences.
Tracking a needle-in-thehaystack search, Moder’s camera swoops into the stadium from overhead, the suggestion of destiny soon giving way to a breathless chase in which the men with badges (Ejiofor and Dean Norris) are anything but superhuman. Nobody here is, of course.
In an obsessive pursuit they stumble, just as surely as they find a reason to get up. – Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter