Release Date: March 6, 1998
Starring: Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, Stockard Channing, Reese Witherspoon, James Garner, Liev Schrieber, Margo Martindale, John Spencer
Directed by: Robert Benton
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
MPAA Rating: R (violence, language, some sexuality)
By all rights and properties of the American movie-going public, Twilight should and will not be a popular movie. It has a target audience of people who were in the prime of their life the last time Paul Newman was in a feature film and it opens on a very crowded weekend with three other, more popular releases (by "popular" I mean a wider target audience). But popularity and weekend gross statistics are by no means a measure of a film's quality, and every once in a while a gem such as Twilight slips through the net.
The storytelling style that Director Robert Benton adopts is equal parts film noir and complex mystery thriller. Although the plot isn't too confusing, it is a prerequisite that the viewer follows along throughout the entire movie: characters' names are important and connections are immediately lost if a role is regarded as unimportant. Although Paul Newman's tongue-in-cheek voice-overs are part of the film noir style, they don't really help to keep the story clear. Fortunately they don't get tiresome or annoying - they were written in to elevate the comfortable level of cyncism that Newman's character of Harry Ross shows.
Harry Ross (Newman) is an ex-police officer, ex-private investigator, and current friend to Jack and Catherine Ames (Gene Hackman and Susan Sarandon). Both former thespians, the Ames' have their share of antagonists. At the time of the movie, which takes place in the Hollywood area, Jack Ames is at the beck and call of a blackmailer (Liev Schrieber) who has information about the death of another actor. At the onset, the danger of this information is unclear, until Jack calls Harry in to pay off the blackmailer. Harry, being an former investigator and policeman, checks out the situation a bit more thoroughly and discovers that Jack and Catherine may not be as innocent as they seem.
The main cast is pretty small, which allows for a lot of plot intricacies to develop. I can't remember the last time I've seen a noir drama with as many plot twists as Twilight. Even the likes of Mission: Impossible, which countless people have told me was far too confusing, didn't have as many turnabouts as Twilight. Even so, some supporting characters were a bit superfluous: both Jack's daughter Mel (Reese Witherspoon) and the blackmailer's parole officer (Margo Martindale) were nothing but excuses to show off a lot of Hollywood's immoral excesses (sex and money, respectively). Nevertheless, quality performances from the upper-echelon likes of Hackman, Sarandon, and Newman didn't hurt, and a believable and interesting story were what powered this movie. Recommendable to everyone except the action-at-any-cost types.
all contents © 1998 Craig Roush