Sleuth 2007

 

 

Sleuth 2007

• Director: Kenneth Branagh
• Seen by this director: Murder on the Orient Express, Cinderella, Thor, The Magic Flute, As You Like It, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Hamlet, In the Bleak Midwinter, Frankenstein, Much Ado About Nothing, Peter’s Friends, Dead Again, Henry V.
• Based on the novel: no, but the play by Anthony Shaffer, screenplay by Harold Pinter
• Cast: Michael Caine, Jude Law
• Personal “oh yeah him/her” reaction, i.e. have seen this actor in:
• Michael Caine – Interstellar, Batman x 3, Inception, Harry Brown, Flawless, Flawless, Children of Men, Last Orders, The Cider House Rules, Little Voice, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Sleuth 1972, Educating Rita, Gambit, Alfie
• Jude Law – Genius, Black Sea, Sherlock Holmes Game of Shadows, Hugo, Contagion, Repo Men, Sherlock Holmes, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Holiday, Breaking and Entering, The Aviator, Closer, Alfie, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Cold Mountain, The Road to Perdition, eXistenZ, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Gattaca, Wilde
• Why? Kenneth Branagh, the cast and the original.
• Seen: Once or twice before. Now 13 September 2020      

       Now Andrew Wyke (Caine) lives in a mega-modernised country mansion with hi-tech surveillance security. Milo Tindle (Law) is an actor having an affair with Andrew’s wife. So the story is basically the same, the wit as pointed, the atmosphere as tense and the dialog as razor-sharp. If anything, Pinter’s screenplay is even a tad sharper. The visuals are, as always with Branagh, peculiar, dizzying and brilliant.

       Again, the choice of actors is faultless. It’s very cool that Caine is now playing Andrew and while he was the perfect Milo, here Law is the perfect Milo.

       It’s hard to know what I would think if I hadn’t seen the original, but this is as evocative, suspenseful and beautifully filmed and performed. The music of Patrick Doyle adds to the atmosphere. It twists away from the original at the end in a somewhat dark disturbing way, but I can’t say that I don’t like it.

       In its way its as good as the original and it’s possibly the best Branagh production that isn’t Shakespeare.

 

5* of 5

 

https://rubyjandsfilmblog.blogspot.com/2020/09/sleuth-1972.html