Benjamin Caron applies Derren Brown experience to direct stylish swindler yarn set in Manhattan with Julianne Moore and John Lithgow leading the way
ovies about confidence-trickery put a new spin on the old rule about playing poker: look around the table and if you can’t see the chump … then it’s you. Watch a film about swindlers and you may well think you can see the person who’s being conned. But the film’s entire narrative procedure, and its pleasure, relies on you, the audience, repeatedly submitting to being played, while in theory you are the one with the wised-up crook’s-eye-view of what is going on.
Screenwriters Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka have had big successes in the world of comedy and satire: now they have crafted this delectably enjoyable caper about fraudsters and Manhattan’s super-rich, a little like something by David Mamet – though without reaching the Mametian hard concrete floor of cynicism – or maybe Stephen Frears’s sleazy drama The Grifters, based on the novel by Jim Thompson.
The movie begins in the most sublimely innocent way: in a sleepy antiquarian New York bookstore. Gentle bibliophile Tom , sits behind the counter reading Edgar Allan Poe, and looks up alertly when a customer comes in: this is the stylish twentysomething Sandra who is after something by Zora Neale Hurston. They get to talking about the PhD she is working on in black feminist studies; he shyly asks her to dinner.
Like the luxury goods that in one scene we see being stolen, the performances are out of the top drawer, and it is a great pleasure to see Moore on such good form: no one cries more needily, and with more nakedly sinister intent, than her. Stan is a smooth rodent of charlatanism; Middleton is a charmer; Lithgow has the wary poise of the fabulously wealthy and Smith is naturally a darker horse than you think.
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