|
Confidence May 01, 2003
|
||
|
Heist movies are a dime a dozen, conmen movies are slightly less frequent, they are a nickel a bakers dozen, basically, what can possibly be mined from them has probably already been. But that doesn’t men they still can’t be good, or for lack of a better term, entertaining. James Foley’s “Confidence” is just that, an entertaining piece of heist/conman movie ground that in ten ways or another has been done better and more satisfactorily. Yet I have a theory, that heist movies like this are long past their original prime, but when done in a way that totally doesn’t insult my intelligence and makes a case for looking nice and sounding smart, then I’m never completely dissatisfied. This above paragraph of mine is kind of misleading, I label the film a heist movie because there is a kind of heist to the loose plot, but the more important term is “conman”. “Confidence” is a movie completely about the inauspicious, professional, sleazy and slick confidence man, as Herman Melville once called him. The conman, a.k.a. the grifter, who will get on your good side, charm you, make you believe he’s good for you and you’re good for him and finally, in ultra complicated moves, will fleece you for whatever he can get away with. The confidence man is self-interested, he’ll fake sympathy but is never sincere, in a way he’s a morally crippled specimen, if morality were ever a factor to his conscience. But it usually isn’t, which is the point; the grifter loves his status, feels a kind of schadenfreude, as Lisa Simpson once tried to explain to her bewildered father Homer, is a case of shameful joy. I would love to meet a grifter, just to see how he operates, the only ones I know are movie grifters, most memorably portrayed by Paul Newman and Robert Redford in “The Sting”, but something tells me real grifters don’t look like Redford and Newman. The confident confidence man in “Confidence” is Jake Vig (Edward Burns), a flashy, good looking kind of guy who at the very beginning of the film is under a gun, about to tell us that he’s seconds away from being killed and he thinks a redhead had something to do with it. Narration by a dead guy is always an amusing trick, Joe Gillis in “Sunset Boulevard” floating face down in Norman Desmond’s pool narrates Billy Wilder’s great Hollywood satire, but in a conman movie, we can’t really take the characters mortality to heart, it’s probably just a con. The narration jumps around in time, three weeks before our hero’s predicament, when a con he was pulling goes horribly wrong. Jake and his crew of four (two partners and one “shill”) have just taken 150 grand off of an unsuspecting accountant, which is good news, but the bad news is that the accountant and his suitcase full of greenbacks belonged to “The King” (Dustin Hoffman, in a memorable but overstated performance). The King is a hyperactive pimp, not really a mafioso and not really a kingpin, but rather an independent megalomaniac with a strip club, a betting problem, a case of ADD, and a short temper. After Jake realizes the boo-boo of stealing from The King (and after his “shill” is killed) he proposes a truce, the money will be returned only if The King finances his next con, the big score, a five million dollar job on a banker, appropriately named Morgan Price (Robert Forester). The hatching and execution of this big heist takes up nearly the final hour of the movie, with the obvious hitches and double crosses common in this kind of film. The conman is nothing without a good crew, and Jake rounds up a good bunch, including a beautiful woman (the redhead he thinks is behind his murder) named Lily (Rachael Weisz), a sexpot who will help in seducing the upper management banker essential to getting the whole ball rolling. Jake’s crew is rounded out by guys named Gordo, Lupus, and Miles, who he trusts but doesn’t like how they indulge in the excesses of the money game, he thinks it’s a dead give away. “Wasn’t it Jack Kerouac who said if you own a rug you own too much? I don’t like Kerouac and driving cross country isn’t my idea of a good time, but he has a point,” says Jake in one of the screenplays brighter lines of non-profane dialogue. This is enough exposition, for after all half the joys of going into a movie about cons upon cons, double tracks and shifty characters is not knowing too much about how it’ll all play out. Unfortunately in the case of this particular film, it runs out of steam, the tricks become tiresome and familiar and anybody who has seen “The Usual Suspects” will see the cynical, contrived and bogus ending coming a mile away. Other than the ending, the primary trouble with “Confidence” is its excess of style. Usually I love a film overloaded on style, that uses nourish neon’s prominently in its color scheme, but when it never relents, edits at an alarming pace and uses the side swipe one too many times to punctuate a scene, it’s overkill. I’ll credit director James Foley (a fellow alumnus of the University at Buffalo’s film department, though he predates me by some 30 years) with a valiant attempt to keep up with today’s style of fast editing, but a long take every now and then can do wonders to even the most unoriginal of circumstances. There are obvious references, influences in “Confidence”. Certainly I could compare it to any classic heist film, but like I said that is unfair, for a better example check out Neil Jordan’s currently playing “The Good Thief” a remake of J.P. Melville’s influential French classic “Bob Le Flambeur”. It could easily align itself with “The Sting” or with Stephen Frears’ dark and superb “The Grifters”, but I think the easy target here is David Mamet, specifically “House of Games”, the overbearing poppa to offspring like this, in which Joe Mantegna plays one too many cons on a tired Lindsay Crouse. Foley’s best film is the film version of Mamet’s sad and impossibly profanity laced salesman parable “Glengarry Glenross” and here, with its similar use of obscenities and tricky winks to “House of Games” he’s not only paying homage to his former collaborator, he’s ripping him off. Mamet uses profanity almost poetically, but in “Confidence” it’s often too much. The actors all do their part fine, Burns is just smarmy enough to pull it off without being overly obnoxious and Weisz really is as sexy as the character needs her to be. A slight disappointment is Dustin Hoffman primarily because his character, so crucial to the plot, only makes cameo appearances. He pops up, talks fast and acts kind of nutty in that classic Hoffman manner of talking fast and acting nutty, but goes long, unforgivable stretches of time off screen. We lose the urgency of his character, and ultimately the novelty of the performance. Hoffman is good, but more face time for The King would have been grand befitting such a royal actor. For all that is wrong and familiar with “Confidence” I’ll stick to my theory that it was entertaining, and I do like the general notion of the grifter. The conman is a unique creature. Be it Jake Vig, John Cusak in “The Grifters” or any of the men in Flannery O’Connor’s short stories; The Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, who brutally murders a god fearing family and laments “It’s no real pleasure in life,” or bible salesman Manly Pointer who steals poor Hulga’s wooden leg in “Good Country People”. They are all men without religion, only around for self-gratification in being able to outwit his fellow being. Whether the cold Southern Christian overtones to O’Connor’s masterpieces, the profane slyness of a Mamet play, or the copycat entertainment in movies like “Confidence”, the conman is, if anything, natures cruel anti-miracle. by Adam Suraf
|