The Grifters

With a cast including Anjelica Huston, John Cusack and Annette Bening, you’d think you were onto a winner. Unfortunately director Stephen Frears doesn’t manage to bring this wholesome tale of life on the grift to life, regardless of the excellent performances from these three players.

Roy is a small-time grifter. He works the easy cons, the five and dimes and seems to get by just fine. However, he pulls one too many swifties and gets a baseball bat to the stomach, resulting in a slow internal bleed over the next couple of days. When his mother, Lilly, stops by while in town on grifty business of her own, she gets him to hospital five seconds before his internal bleeding can kill him – a debt she won’t let him forget.

"No, I’m me."

Roy’s girlfriend seems to be an airheaded hooker, but beneath she’s worked the long cons – those con jobs that take weeks for the big payoff. While Roy and his mother begin a faltering re-acquaintance after eight years, she tries to get Roy to join her on her next big con. Meanwhile, Lilly has skimmed one coin too many from her boss and he’s not entirely pleased with her. With both women vying for Roy’s attention, his existing small con lifestyle is suddenly in turmoil.

What was a good chance for a fun film about stripping marks of their hard-earned moolah sees Frears having created a long-winded sleeper that goes a long way toward telling us nothing. There isn’t even a decent twist in the end to justify the attention for those willing to sit through the whole thing. Admittedly the film does pick itself up around halfway, but the final ‘twist’ or series of minor twists if you’d prefer, haven’t been batted about, nor complicated with enough red herrings to be any real surprise. In fact, it is so limited in its characters and final tying of threads that we are way ahead of the characters and the plot. And that’s never a good thing for a film.

While I enjoy the work of all three staple actors and they do what work they can with a mediocre script and ordinary storyline, this doesn’t rate for any of them among their better films and I’m hard pressed to recommend this for anything other than a rental. There’s just not enough going on to interest us, the character development is severely limited (while having numerous chances to expand upon) and the shooting of the film is nothing to get excited about. In fact, the only real exciting part of the film is in Annette Bening getting her gear off on a couple of occasions and that’s hardly the only thing a film should be recommended by.

Shot in 1990, this transfer is a little disappointing to say the least. Frequent instances of transfer and compression woes dog the landscape as do the infrequent but apparent film artefacts. There are occasional grainy shots in the interior dark shots and some macro blocking sepia moments in the latter half of the film. Otherwise colour is fairly good, the picture quality is clear enough and the blacks are true. Shadow detail isn’t the best and in numerous darker and night shots in the latter half, much of the detail is wholly swallowed entirely. The film has been transferred with an anamorphically enhanced aspect ratio of 1.85:1, which does the job admirably for a film that doesn’t make any real use of long shots or landscapes.

This Dolby Digital stereo affair is all that’s really required for this talkie, though the music of Elmer Bernstein, while setting the scene okay, does intrude heavily upon the rest of the soundscape. This score is quite unbalanced and repetitive and gets slightly irritating after not a long time. It’s also needlessly dramatic at times and overly dramatic at others, even attempting to sound like that other great con movie The Sting at times. This puts the film in a different time frame aurally that contrasts heavily and not effectively with the modern setting.

Dialogue is all fine enough, though I had trouble at times with some mumbled words from Ms. Bening and mutterings from Ms. Huston. However, the rest of it is clear enough and the sound effects all fit nicely where they are supposed to. Still, it’s an ordinary film with ordinary sound.

Some themed animated menus are all there are on offer here, with the rest of the extras being conned of their children’s shoe money.

What is set up to look like a great film is actually a pedestrian affair of lacklustre appeal. Performances are certainly able, but there isn’t much by way of script or character development for the capable actors to work with. Wholly flavourless, this isn’t among any of the busy actor’s better works and is barely worth a revisit as a rental, should you have seen it before. I’m sorry to say, The Grifters is a con job. It looks great at first, but under the façade, there’s nothin’.