Film critic Richard Crouse reviews ‘Devil’s Knot’, ‘Whitewash’, ‘I, Frankenstein’, and ‘Blue Jasmine’ with CTV News Channel’s Marcia McMillan. Tune in every Friday afternoon at 2:50 pm to see Richard and Marcia chat movies!
Watch this whole clip HERE!
Canada AM’s film critic Richard Crouse shares his reviews for ‘Devil’s Knot,’ ‘Whitewash,’ and ‘Blue Jasmine.’
Watch the whole thing HERE!
In Chloe, the new psychological thriller from Canadian director Atom Egoyan, Amanda Seyfried plays an escort hired by Catherine (Julianne Moore) to test her husband’s (Liam Neeson) fidelity.
Following starring roles in Mean Girls, Mama Mia and the popular HBO show Big Love, this is her first real adult part. It’s a complicated and showy role for the twenty-five-year-old actress, and she credits Egoyan with pushing her to deepen the character by exploring every facet of Chloe’s life.
“It’s a broad spectrum of emotions the audience feels about her,” she says, “and in order to make the audience feel that way you have to play it right and in order for me to play it right I had to have Atom Egoyan.
“Mr. Egoyan,” she continues, “is a genius and he’s what good filmmaking is all about. I know it’s going to be difficult for me to choose my next project based on what I just went through with him. It has raised the bar into a very high place.”
It’s obvious that Seyfried admires Egoyan, but it appears to be a mutual appreciation society. In a separate interview the director called the actress’s audition “exceptional.”
“There were a lot more famous people than her we considered but she was our gal,” he said. “We knew that from the moment we did the audition. There was just something about her. Fortunately in the intervening period she suddenly became a star with Mama Mia.”
Her star was on the rise before they made the film, but on the first day Egoyan had a moment of doubt.
“I have this reputation for hiring very young actresses,” he says, “and the day she arrived in Toronto, I thought, ‘My God, she’s a child. We’ve made a mistake.’ But we needed the separation in age between Julianne [Moore] and her. That was really very important.”
Any doubts were soon quashed when Seyfried went to work, however.
“She’s a really good actress. She really grew into the role,” he says. “It’s about a relationship you have with some actors. You feel like you are doing your job because you are able to ignite something they are capable of expressing. I don’t mean to in anyway objectify, but it’s like working with a beautiful instrument. That’s what she has.”
Despite being a remake of a French film the new movie from Atom Egoyan bears all the earmarks of the director’s work. Continuing his career long examination of sexual taboos and miscommunication he’s made a movie that is part sexual Scheherazade, part Single White Female but is also his most straightforward movie in years.
Starring Amanda Seyfried as an escort hired by Catherine (Julianne Moore) to test her husband’s (Liam Neeson) fidelity, it’s a steamy thriller the director calls “an extreme examination of how to re-eroticize a marriage.” Add to that a layer of sexual obsession and you get a film that feels like a throwback to the erotic thrillers of a couple of decades ago.
Egoyan has crafted a feature that breathes the same air as Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct; films made when the director was busy making his own subtly sexual films like Exotica. At the time Roger Ebert wrote, “There is a quality in all of his work that resists the superficial and facile. Even at the very start, he wasn’t interested in simple storytelling.” Until now, Roger, until now.
There is no question that Egoyan is as gifted a filmmaker as we have working in this country, but Chloe, I’m afraid doesn’t denote a high-water mark in his filmography.
He does, however, bring much to the table.
The film is gorgeous to look at—from the beauty shots of Toronto, to the collective “wowness” of the cast. To match the rich visuals he’s brought his own sensibility to the story, and instead of simply remaking Nathalie, the French film Chloe is based on, he has populated the plot with strong female characters. And, as befits any erotic thriller there are twists and turns galore. Unfortunately most of them will be obvious to anyone who has ever read a Joe Eszterhas script and that is the film’s Achilles’ Heel.
The movie’s closing moments play like a predictable b-movie, albeit a highbrow one, but a b-movie nonetheless.
Chloe marks the first time Egoyan has worked from a script that he didn’t write and despite its angels—nice performances and beautiful photography—it made me yearn for the auteur of the Exotica years who would have made an uncompromising movie with a more dramatic ending.
This is Atom Egoyan’s most accomplished and daring work so far. The story of the 1915 Armenian holocaust is something that Mr. Egoyan feels passionately about, and that very fervour breaks through the iciness that has defined his other work. It is a complex, difficult movie that relies too heavily on exposition from the main characters to tell the story. Egoyan has turned the classic “show me, don’t tell me” rule of filmmaking on its head, making a wordy movie with too many tangential plots. It’s a confusing, but compelling work that works more often than it doesn’t, but threatens to collapse under the weight of its own earnestness.
