Stephen Frears (1990)

Stephen Frears’ best film to date is set in and around Los Angeles.  It’s about three swindlers:  Lilly (Anjelica Huston), her estranged son Roy (John Cusack), born to Lilly when she was only fourteen, and his lover Myra (Annette Bening).  Based on a Jim Thompson novel adapted for the screen by Donald E Westlake, The Grifters is well constructed and entertaining:  your awareness that it’s no more than that helps you to enjoy even more what the director and actors make of it.  Familiar film noir character types and lighting give us our bearings but Frears’ treatment adds blackish humour and emotional depth that take the material out of the ordinary.  In a skilful balancing act, he combines details so stylised that they’re funny (like the competitive strutting of Lilly and Myra) with scenes in which the danger inherent in the world the characters inhabit is expressed as startlingly real violence.  There’s extraordinary suspense in a sequence in which Bobo Justus (Pat Hingle), Lilly’s boss, terrifies her with violence which is at first threatened, then explodes, then – almost more powerfully – goes back under the surface.

Occasionally the storytelling isn’t as clear as it might be but Frears handles his cast impeccably.  The age gap between Lilly and Myra – rather less than ten years – keeps changing before your eyes.  At first, the unfazeable, effervescent Myra seems generations younger but, once we learn that the golden age of her criminal career is some time past, we watch Myra’s discontent shading into desperation – not just in her actions but also in her face, where there are crows-feet and tensions we hadn’t noticed before.  Annette Bening shapes her performance superbly:  the more sexily daring, funny and charming Myra becomes, the more dangerous we realise she is – the development of this character has a relentless double charge.  When Myra’s laughing insouciance disappears, her impregnability goes with it.  Frears keeps shifting the balance of power between her and Lilly – and our perceptions of these two femmes fatales – so that we become less sure who’s who.  While Myra uses her sexuality as a weapon, Lilly uses hers as armour.  It’s Anjelica Huston’s (brilliant) achievement that, when Lilly means to look her hardest, we can see (and hear, in her nervy inflections) how brittle her edgy self-assurance is.  It’s when she lets us see her raw emotional attachment to Roy that Lilly’s neurotic power becomes intimidating.  Huston’s first, marvellously expressive appearance, walking up a small flight of stairs at a racecourse, tells us that Lilly is threatened and tough.  The film describes how, the more threatened she is, the more threatening she becomes.  (The climax of The Grifters demonstrates spectacularly the old adage that when the going gets tough the tough get going.)

Roy can’t cope with these two dominating women but John Cusack isn’t overawed by the force of the two star female performances.  His less immediately exciting acting gives the film a pleasing balance and his more familiar human weakness keeps the director – and the viewer – from maintaining a smug distance from the story.  Lilly tells Roy that he’s too good for grifting (and for Myra); then she says he just hasn’t the stomach to be even a very small time con artist.  The intelligence and apprehension in Roy’s eyes tell us that Lilly is right on both counts.   Cusack subtly uses his somehow amorphous body (compared with the two women’s bodies, anyway) and funny, dry line readings to suggest Roy’s displaced insecurity.  He seems sure of himself only when he’s verbally laying into Lilly – when attack is the best means of defence for Roy (although Lilly still seems stronger).  Roy has chosen a criminal career to follow in his mother’s footsteps but he fights shy of partnership with either her or Myra.  Stephen Frears manipulates the predictable Oedipal theme wittily.  Sex as a means to the end of money is another unsurprising motif that’s ingeniously patterned and brought by Anjelica Huston to a memorably avid, ambivalent climax.  There are vivid performances in smaller roles from Gailard Sartain and J T Walsh (as, respectively, Roy’s and Myra’s mentors in crime) and, especially, from Pat Hingle as the psychopathic, bulldog-like Bobo.  Even the smallest parts are carefully cast (the racecourse tote clerks have exactly the right look of shopsoiled suspiciousness).  Everyone seems to be working in harmony:  Donald E Westlake has the knack of juxtaposing a clichéd line of dialogue (‘You didn’t have to do that’) with a more surprising rejoinder (‘I thought I did’); and the humorous, ominous score by Elmer Bernstein always serves the story well.  Photography by Oliver Stapleton.  Produced by Martin Scorsese.

[1990s]