Word: sleuth
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...kindred spirit to Mankiewicz: a cunning wordsmith with a playwright brother; his identical twin, Peter, wrote Equus and Amadeus. Like Mankiewicz (and Pinter, for that matter), Shaffer was fascinated by the ability of language to reveal, conceal and distort the workings of a person's mind and desires. In Sleuth he created a Chinese-box plot that on the surface was a very theatrical mystery, but at heart was a parable of sexual envy and English class hatred. Again, right up Pinter's dark alley...
...Indeed, Sleuth (which Pinter has said he never saw performed) is a project that seems perfect for him. He made his esteemed rep with creepy, enigmatic studies of human menace - works like The Caretaker, The Homecoming, Old Times, No Man's Land. He'd put two people in a room (that is, on the stage) and not let them out till the bitterness erupted and the blood flowed. Such was Pinter's craft and nerve that the audience felt as caged as the characters. It just made sense to let him loose on Shaffer's one-room play about...
...than two hours; the new one synopsizes all that plot into the first hour, then adds a third act that diminishes, demeans, defames both the material and the actors. To slam home the theme of sexual aggression, Pinter forces one of the characters to dress in drag. Which makes Sleuth fit into the year's dominant trend, of movies from 300 to Blades of Glory, from Chuck and Larry to Superbad: guys channel their attraction or hatred for each other into games of teasing and fighting...
...What's clear from the opening shot of Branagh's version is that he desperately wants this Sleuth to be not the record of a play but a real, filmy film. Unfortunately, his notion of film is a combination of bizarre camera angles and an alternation of baffling long shots and punishing closeups. Once upon a time, Branagh directed some agreeable movies: the burly Henry V, the inventive Much Ado About Nothing. So I can't say his visual choices here are made from ignorance. They have to be called willfully stupid. The mise-en-scene becomes so aggressive that...
...viewer. I wouldn't necessarily put this film in the atrocity category of a lower-I.Q. torture exercise like Captivity. But if you consider what the exalted quartet of Branagh, Pinter, Caine and Law might have done with the project, and what they did to it, Sleuth has to be the worst prestige movie of the year...