Cinematical

The universe of film noir has several constants, including aggressive smoking or drinking, sharply shadowed photography, and a universal canvas that allows much of the action to take place off-screen. But ever since Barbara Stanwyck went grocery shopping with her sunglasses on in Double Indemnity, there has been another element as well: the overblown, baroque conspirator who is more interested in committing crime than getting anything out of it. It's this element that many of today's directors find hardest to recreate - creating characters that are cheerfully rotten.

One of the better film noir efforts of recent years is Harold Becker's Malice, a film that has all of the elements listed above, along with a flashy plot structure and a central conspiracy that is more complex than quantum theory. And the whole business is classed up by a talent roster that includes Alec Baldwin, Nicole Kidman, Gwyneth Paltrow, George C. Scott, and Anne Bancroft. That's the kind of line-up that had to come at just the right time, so as not to be prohibitively expensive. There are also a number of high-caliber character actors who populate the smaller roles of the film.

Andy Safian (Bill Pullman) and his wife Tracy (Nicole Kidman), he a college dean and she a school teacher, are trying to get pregnant and start a life together. To make some quick money, they rent out the top floor of their house to Andy's old college friend, Jed (Alec Baldwin) who is a well-known, almost genius surgeon, and recently arrived in town to start work at a local hospital. After Jed arrives, two events occur to shatter Andy's peaceful life: Tracy collapses in her bathroom from an unknown medical problem and must be rushed to the hospital, and female students at the college start turning up dead.

It's at this point that Malice splits in two and we start watching two stories on one reel. We see the search for the college serial killer and the aftermath of what happens when Tracy's ovaries are ruined during emergency surgery and she decides to sue the hospital and the doctors who operated on her, for millions. If all of this seems like a coordinated attack on both Andy's professional life and personal life...well, maybe that's one way of putting it.

Throughout the movie, the audience works itself into a lather trying to piece together how the two halves of the film will meet at the end. Going into further detail would be unconscionable, so let me pose some questions for you to return to after you've seen the film: chiefly, who the hell is Tracy's doctor? He is the mysterious black hole of the story. Rarely has a film gotten more out a character that does not appear in the credits. Secondly, why not show the events at the abortion clinic? I'm sure that must have appeared in some version of the script.

Leaving essential characters out of the script is just one of the film's essential noir elements - there are many others. Conspirators must meet each other in exotic locations. A lonely detective almost pieces things together. There's a back-story about one of the characters so wrenching that it takes Anne Bancroft several shots of scotch to get it out. And, as always, one of the criminals isn't willing to go to the mattresses to get the job done.

It's not giving anything away to say that the film's signature scene comes when Jed is being deposed in Tracy's malpractice hearing, and he decides to riff on the meaning of the term 'God complex.' This is Alec Baldwin at his finest, excreting his shampoo-commercial charm while at the same time creeping you out by the high-pressure pitch of his personality. His character has an interesting way of ingratiating himself by being aggressively personable and posing little what-ifs to entertain. He poses the following question to Andy: would you agree to have a pinky finger surgically amputated to the joint, no pain, for a million dollars? It's an interesting question, and I think I would ask to see the money.

His character also has a dark side that announces itself with subtlety from the start: he has conspicuously loud sex from his top-floor loft while Andy and Tracy try to sleep below, which makes you wonder what kind of message he might be trying to send. The question of Jed's sexuality is made overtly threatening to Andy, and it's interesting to see how that angle plays out.

Nicole Kidman also gives a stand-out performance in the film as Tracy, the supremely frustrated malpractice victim who is prone to temper-tantrums and has a fear of needles. There's a certain bared-teeth quality she effuses in this film which is heightened by the lens of the master Gordon Willis. She has a number of key shots in shadow and appears so pale as to almost be vampiric. This was Willis' penultimate film, and a worthy entry in the catalog, with a number of superbly photographed scenes.

My biggest complaint about the film involves Bill Pullman: it's not that he can't chew the leather, it's that he's given too much screen time. This story revolves around Kidman and Baldwin, and since very little is explained anyway, it would have served the plot more to keep the focus away from middling detective work and more on the plum roles. Also, the film's score is weak. But all in all, Malice hits enough notes to be a worth entry in the genre, and to ignite a conversation about the future of film noir. Will it continue to mutate and survive, like the western? Or will it stagnate and become anchored to history, like the musical?