Adrian Lyne’s thriller about a weekend affair is slick, tense and superbly acted, with Glenn Close turning a woman the script wants as a monster into someone we pity. Then the last reel arrives and turns a study of guilt into a slasher film.
Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) is a Manhattan lawyer with a wife, a daughter and a good flat. Beth (Anne Archer) and Ellen (Ellen Hamilton Latzen) go away for a weekend, and he spends it with Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), an editor he met at a party. James Dearden’s script then spends the rest of its length making him pay. For about ninety minutes it is a first-rate thriller, tense and well acted and better made than its reputation. Then the last reel arrives, and it is a different and worse film.
Close is the reason to watch it. She plays Alex as a woman who believes every word she says, and she makes the pleading come before the rage, so that when Dan tries to leave on the Sunday night we understand exactly why she cannot let him. There is a scene, midway, in which she is alone in her loft, and it is not frightening at all. It is desolate. We pitied her, and we went on pitying her long past the point where the film wanted us to stop, which is a measure of how far ahead of her script Close is.
Douglas is good at the two things Dan needs, smugness and panic, and he lets the first curdle into the second by degrees. His Dan keeps looking around for someone to tell him this is unfair, and the film, to its discredit, tends to agree with him. Anne Archer has the hardest job, the wife who must be warm enough that we want the marriage saved and sharp enough that we believe she could run it, and she does both with almost nothing written down. Stuart Pankin, as Dan’s friend Jimmy, supplies the few laughs.
Adrian Lyne directs with more discipline than he showed in 9½ Weeks the year before. Howard Atherton’s photography keeps Dan’s world and Alex’s looking like two different cities, and the film is at its best when it crosses from one to the other. Mel Bourne’s loft for Alex is the best single set in the film, and it tells you more about her than any line does. Ellen Mirojnick’s costumes do the same quiet work of keeping the two women apart before the script gets round to it. Maurice Jarre’s score is mostly a low synthesised pulse, and it knows when to stop.
The frightening scenes are small ones. Peter E. Berger and Michael Kahn cut the telephone calls so that the ring lands a half-beat before we are ready for it, and there is a stretch in the middle when we flinched every time a phone was in shot. That is proper craft, and it is done with a prop that costs nothing.
Then the film loses its nerve. Dearden’s Alex is written as a symptom rather than a person, and every scene after the midpoint takes something from her until only the threat is left. The wife at home is good and sane; the woman with a job and a flat of her own is mad; and the film does not seem to notice what it is saying. The ending was reshot after test screenings, and it shows. The last twenty minutes are cut in glimpses and reflections, as a slasher film, and we were angry, because the film had spent an hour and a half making Alex someone we could not look away from and then decided she was a monster after all.
Most critics land somewhere in the middle on this one and so do we. Watch it for Close, for Archer, and for the phone calls. It runs 119 minutes and carries an 18. It reached British cinemas on 15 January 1988, and the final reel has not improved with age.
