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SLEUTH
Directed by: Kenneth Branagh.
Produced by: Jude Law, Simon Halfon, Tom Sternberg, Marion Pilowsky, Branagh & Simon Moseley.
Written by: Harold Pinter, based on the play by Anthony Shaffer.
Director of Photography: Haris Zambarloukos.
Edited by: Neil Farrell.
Music by: Patrick Doyle.
Released by: Sony Pictures Classics.
Country of Origin: UK. 86 minutes. Rated R.
With: Jude Law & Michael Caine.

Serviceably filmed previously by Joseph L. Mankiewicz in his last directorial effort in 1972, the new Sleuth is a tight two-hander psychodrama, even when it eventually goes off the deep end. Adaptor Harold Pinter immediately updates his source, Anthony Shaffer’s play. The lovely, old, isolated country house’s eccentric collection of automaton toys is now a high-tech, remote-controlled security system of closed-circuit cameras watching over a metallic, modernist cave set for a duel between today’s cave men.

In the opening surveillance shot, the small car espied entering this battle zone of wits belongs to cocky Milo Tindle (Jude Law), who may or may not be a hairdresser, as in the original, or perhaps an unemployed actor as he claims to the master of the house, wealthy detective novelist Andrew Wyke (Michael Caine, now reversing his role from the earlier film, giving a steelier interpretation to the character emotionally played by Laurence Olivier). But the purpose of Milo’s visit becomes clearer – the younger man, the lover of the older man’s wife, has come to get Andrew to agree to a divorce. The resulting dialogue is considerably more pungent than 35 years ago (with mercifully no Viagra jokes amidst the cutting humor about who’s what is bigger).

Pinter pares down by almost a third, retaining only a few lines from the earlier film yet maintaining the same basic twisted plot structure. But in this version, the woman the men are supposedly competing over gradually becomes irrelevant. (Though there is a large photograph of Maggie the wife, she is more often represented in the frame as a headless mannequin.) When push comes to shove, these men may not even need women as they switch roles again and again in grueling rounds of psychological games, scoring wins through inflicted humiliations, with the Cole Porter tunes in the earlier film replaced by an overtly homoerotic wrestling match.

Kenneth Branagh’s direction heightens the battle through very deliberate camera angles, whether through the wide shots of the security cameras, seeing the men as body parts or from the back, and then strategically lunging in for close-ups and nose-to-nose confrontations for maximum effect.

As one of the film’s producers, Jude Law has given himself his flashiest role since AI Artificial Intelligence and Road to Perdition. His Milo builds to a more unpredictable intensity than his Closer cad and makes great use of his devastating handsomeness. While an exchange retains Andrew’s sarcasm about Milo’s Italian heritage, the class issues are more muted, and Law only once slips into an Alfie Cockney swagger that the younger Caine laid bare more under stress. With Philip Glass-like repetition, Patrick Doyle’s deceptively simple string score contributes effectively to the building tension. Nora Lee Mandel
October 12, 2007