WIFE AND DEATH

Michael Douglas plots against his unfaithful spouse, Gwyneth
Paltrow, in the sleek yet sleazy A Perfect Murder.


Review by Owen Gleiberman

Does Michael Douglas ever stop glimmering? In A Perfect Murder
(Warner Bros.), the swank, voluptuously morose new thriller in
which he plays a wealthy New Yorker who tries to do away with
his unfaithful wife, Douglas, as usual, has the look of a
corporate conqueror made entirely of tarnished gold. Tall, tan,
and delicately fleshy, with priceless suits and a full head of
exquisitely combed back hair, he might be primping for a GQ
fashion spread on the glory of the middle-aged executive, yet
there's a rich glow of rage coming from those pampered pores.
Douglas' highly polished aura of corruption does more than
outshine the other actors. The film's atmosphere of luxe
malevolence seems to emanate right from his cutthroat sheen.

A remake of the entertaining Alfred Hitchcock potboiler Dial M
for Murder (1954), A Perfect Murder has been directed, by
Andrew Davis (The Fugitive), in a style that might be described
as mid-period Adrian Lyne; the film could just as well have
been entitled Indecently Attractive Fatal Proposal. The
cocktail glasses clink seductively, the overhead light seems to
melt everyone's faces to pure cream and shadow, and much of the
action takes place in the sort of ridiculously spacious, marble-
glam, priceless-art-object-strewn apartment that looks like a
posh mausoleum for its own inhabitants. Douglas plays millionaire
industrialist Steven Taylor, who's smart enough to figure out
that his gorgeous young wife, Emily (Gwyneth Paltrow), is having
an affair with a sexy, longhaired, dangerously unshaven artist,
David Shaw (Viggo Mortensen), whose canvases are portraits
streaked with violent slashes of color. Why, exactly, has she
strayed? Whatever the reason might have been in the script, it
now comes down to this: Michael Douglas is an angry lizard, and
anyone who's married to him will surely need a break from
massaging his scales.

Wounded by the revelation of his wife's infidelity, Taylor pays
a visit to Shaw's paint-spattered dark loft and confronts his
rival with a surprise offer: He'll pay Shaw half a million
dollars to murder Emily. Taylor even has a plan cooked up:
He'll provide Shaw with a key to the apartment and then phone
Emily at a fixed time--at which point Shaw, pretending to be an
anonymous intruder, will spring from the shadows and strike.
This is the same scheme that powered Hitchcock's film, only now,
in the age of media-wide adultery, it feels far more deeply
misogynistic. The fact that Taylor, in his black-hearted fury,
would relish the chance to snuff not the man who was sleeping
with his wife but the loved one herself appears to grow out of
the ugliest side of Douglas' gargoyle grin. The plot now
features a prominent howler as well: The telephone-call gambit,
which Hitch employed to set up a famous episode in 3-D, makes
no sense in the age of answering machines. Taylor has to assume
that his wife is going to get out of her bath and walk all the
way to the kitchen just to answer the damn phone.

Paltrow, with bright red lips and skin that's almost as blond
as her hair, seems color coordinated to the film's mood of
commodified malice. After the murder attempt goes horribly awry--
the bloody encounter itself is scary in a garish, high-
exploitation way--David Suchet, looking like the Middle Eastern
ghost of Columbo, shows up as a hawkish New York detective.
Eagerly, we sit back to watch Taylor try and sleaze out of his
actions. But the police investigation is merely a sideshow. Shaw
the starving artist turns out to be a bigger manipulator than we
thought, and the film becomes a game of competing male creeps,
with Paltrow doing her best to enact the agony of a stalked
trophy wife. The story, in its rather convoluted way, keeps you
guessing, but there's something reductive and dispiriting about
the way A Perfect Murder tramples the goodness of everyone on
screen. In the second half, the characters keep trying to scam,
or kill, one another, and we realize that we're not really
rooting for anyone. I'm not sure Viggo Mortensen could ever be
someone to root for. He seems a little too in love with his own
cheekbones.

Hitchcock could stage this sort of material with silvery finesse,
in part because the restrictions of the era forced suggestiveness
upon filmmakers. Now, with everything out in the open, the sheer
brutality of the conniving overwhelms any sense of mystery or
crushed romanticism. I've seen far worse thrillers than A Perfect
Murder, but the movie is ultimately more competent than
pleasurable. All that lingers from it is the color of money.

B-