Stephen Frears’s con-artist drama is cruel, funny and worth the discomfort. Anjelica Huston makes its mother-and-son struggle frightening, though John Cusack’s restraint sometimes leaves too much of the work to the women around him.
Stephen Frears’s The Grifters is a sharp, unsettling crime drama that we recommend, despite an imbalance between its central performances. It gets considerable pleasure from people who make a living deceiving others, and knows how unpleasant their company can become. Donald E. Westlake adapts Jim Thompson’s novel around three con artists: Roy Dillon, his mother Lilly and his girlfriend Myra. The interest is in what happens when people accustomed to deceiving strangers try to maintain relationships with those who know them.
Anjelica Huston gives Lilly the authority that makes the film work. She can be ruthlessly self-interested and still seem to care about her son, an awkward combination that Huston refuses to simplify. We were unsettled by her scenes with John Cusack, because Lilly’s concern for Roy carries such a strong expectation of obedience. Huston makes it difficult to decide how much of that concern Roy can safely accept, and Frears allows the discomfort to persist.
Annette Bening’s Myra supplies a more openly enjoyable kind of danger, and Bening makes her pleasure in manipulation persuasive. There is humour in the performance without a request to forgive the character, which is exactly what this material needs. Cusack’s Roy is quieter, a sensible choice beside two performances that might otherwise compete for every scene. The trouble is that his restraint sometimes leaves Roy looking underwritten: we understand why he cannot dominate these women, but there are stretches when his place at the centre seems something the screenplay has decided for him.
Oliver Stapleton’s photography keeps our attention on faces, making us search for signs of calculation even when somebody seems sincere. Dennis Gassner’s production design helps the Los Angeles setting accommodate people whose behaviour belongs to an older hardboiled crime story. That mismatch is part of the film’s unease, and Frears wisely avoids making it a joke.
Mick Audsley’s editing gives the exchanges time to become uncomfortable, while keeping the competing claims on Roy clear. We can follow who is putting pressure on whom without needing every change of advantage explained. Elmer Bernstein’s music is more emphatic, and occasionally presses the menace harder than the performances require. It suits the film’s taste for pulp melodrama, but there are moments when less insistence would have left us more attention for the actors.
Confidence-trick stories can encourage us to cheer the cleverest operator and forget whoever is being robbed. Frears makes that response difficult by bringing deceit into a mother-and-son relationship, where knowing someone’s weaknesses has consequences beyond an empty wallet. Westlake keeps the hardness funny without letting the family connection become an excuse for it. We do not need a decent person inserted into the story to tell us that something is wrong with the way these people treat each other.
At 110 minutes, it has time to make those relationships uncomfortable without labouring every exchange. We would choose it for Huston and Bening, with the warning that the humour offers little relief from the hostility between the characters. Keep it for an evening when nobody needs cheering up.
