TIFF Reviews
Sleuth
Kenneth Branagh
(86’, US)
***
First a Tony Award–winning play by Anthony Shaffer, then a 1972 film directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz starring Laurence Olivier, Sleuth has a bright, shiny past. Crafty director Kenneth Branagh and co-producer Jude Law knowingly sought out ever-clever Nobel laureate Harold Pinter to pen the screenplay for this third iteration, realizing full well that there are few who master the unsettling mix of menace, wit and the bizarre as well as he. Law does double duty as Milo Tindle, an out-of-work actor who arrives at mystery writer Andrew Wyke’s (Michael Caine) minimalist estate to discuss affairs of the heart: the former is in love with the latter’s wife and wants him to grant her a divorce. What begins as a polite, if loaded, confab quickly turns into a tortuous cat-and-mouse game in which both men struggle to gain—and keep—the upper hand. Law’s slightly uneven performance as the petulant Milo (a role Caine portrayed in the ’70s version—a deft bit of casting on Branagh’s part) doesn’t quite stand up to Caine’s elegantly maniacal interpretation, but it’s Pinter’s precise, controlled dialogue that’s the most exciting aspect of the film. As a result, one is almost left wishing for the raw immediacy of the stage over the glossy sheen of celluloid. (SV)
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