|
|
|
Newest Reviews: New Movies - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter Old Movies - Touki Bouki: The Journey of the Hyena The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry Archives - Recap: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 , 2005, 2006, 2007 , 2008 , 2009 , 2010 , 2011 , 2012
|
The
Secret in Their Eyes (Juan José Campanella, 2009)
Esposito
(Ricardo Darín), a retired court investigator, cracks the case that has haunted
his entire career in the sluggish, forgettable
The Secret in Their Eyes.
Director Juan José Campanella, a two-time Oscar-winning Argentinian director who
has also done extensive work on American television shows including
Law and Order, uses that background
to craft this procedural drama, which could be mistaken for the pilot episode of
a TV program. A little bit scary and a little bit sexy, the drama on display
here oscillates between the pursuit of a murderer who killed a woman in 1974 and
a blunted relationship between the court investigator and a female attorney.
This combination of sex and secrets, which must be a potent one for a large
number of viewers, recalls that found in the recent hit
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,
which turned into a similarly improbable subtitled success story.
Campanella’s
work here is certainly polished (there’s even one ostentatious tracking shot set
at a soccer game that feels like it’s been dropped in from another, more
ambitious movie) and well-acted, but there’s little that one can do with hoary
material like this. From the start, his hero is doggedly pursuing leads that
eluded investigators for decade. From the start, he is told that the pursuit is
hopeless. From the start, we know how it will all turn out. It seems curious
that as Hollywood has begun straying from this sort of police procedural to
focus its attention on translating globally-acceptable licensed properties to
the big screen, the foreign film market has stepped up to offer something of a
substitute for the homegrown crime film.
Better
examples of this sort of thing abound, though. Bong Joon-ho’s 2003 work
Memories of Murder, for example,
managed to make its lingering mystery into something genuinely unsettling, and
was more successful in its stabs at comedy to boot. Campanella’s work exudes a
dull proficiency, at best, failing to make its characters’ obsessions sting or
to transform this single investigation into a disquieting reminder of
Argentina’s descent into dictatorship. By its end, it seems that
The Secret in Their Eyes has crafted
a decade-spanning mystery mostly as a means of ensuring that there are plenty of
opportunities to showcase some laughable, distracting old-age makeup.
The secrets that it holds are scarcely worth discovering.
46
Jeremy
Heilman
07.09.10
|
