Barry Levinson turns Michael Crichton’s sex-swapped harassment novel into a handsome corporate thriller that keeps flinching from its own premise. Douglas and Moore hold the screen, the offices are the best character, and the thinking stops where the plot starts.
Michael Crichton’s idea, carried over intact by Paul Attanasio’s screenplay, is to take a sexual harassment case and reverse the sexes. Tom Sanders (Michael Douglas) is passed over for promotion in favour of Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore), the woman he used to sleep with. She asks him to her office after hours. What happens there, and the two accounts of it that each of them gives the next day, is meant to be the film. For about twenty minutes it is. Then Disclosure decides it would rather be a thriller about who is lying, and once it has decided that, it has also decided who, and the argument is over before the lawyers sit down.
The office scene is the one everybody remembers and it is a strange piece of work. Douglas plays a man who wants to, knows he must not, and is cross about both at once, and his face does three or four things in a single take that the film does not seem to have planned for. We were uncomfortable watching it, and not in the way Levinson intended: we laughed, and then wondered whether we were supposed to, and the film never told us. Moore has the harder part and is given less to do with it. Attanasio writes Meredith as a threat with a haircut, every line a dare, so there is never a second account for us to half believe.
What follows is a competent legal thriller, and competence is not nothing. Roma Maffia’s Catherine Alvarez is the best thing in the film: brisk, unimpressed, a lawyer who treats her client’s outrage as a scheduling problem. Dylan Baker’s Philip Blackburn, the company counsel, watches every room he walks into as if pricing it. Donald Sutherland gives Bob Garvin the air of a man who stopped reading his own memos years ago. Stu Linder cuts the mediation scenes cleanly, letting the two versions of the evening play against each other without tricks, and for a while the film has the pleasure of a good procedural.
It also has Neil Spisak’s offices, which deserve the praise they have had. The company’s headquarters is a converted brick warehouse with glass partitions and an open atrium, so that everyone can see everyone else and nobody can hear anything, which is the right building for a film about who saw what. Tony Pierce-Roberts shoots it with rain running down the windows and the light coming in flat and grey from the water. Gloria Gresham puts Moore in dark suits with a skirt cut to the thigh and Douglas in the same beige jacket for a week, and the costumes tell you the power balance before anyone speaks.
Ennio Morricone wrote the score, and we checked the credit twice. It is soft synthesiser and a piano line that could have come from any studio thriller of the period, and it is the one place where a credit promises more than the film delivers.
Then there is the virtual reality sequence, in which Tom puts on a headset and walks through the company’s files rendered as a cathedral of glowing drawers while a colleague’s avatar deletes them around him. We laughed out loud, which the film did not want, and then found we rather enjoyed it, because it is the only stretch of the 128 minutes in which anyone is taking a risk. The rest is a machine, and a well-maintained one.
Levinson made Diner and Rain Man, films that run on people talking, and he is a good director of rooms. Here he is running a Crichton plot, and Crichton’s plots run themselves. Set against the other films in which Douglas is undone by a woman in a suit, this is the tamest, and the one that most wants to be taken seriously.
Most critics landed close to where we have, mildly entertained and faintly annoyed, and we can only agree with them. See it if a glossy 1990s office thriller in the rain is your idea of an evening; the 18 certificate is for one scene, and the scene is the point. Everything after it is very well made and does not need to be about anything.
