Tricky Business
by Chris Dashiell

Mystery thrillers, if they’re done right, offer a special kind of pleasure. Besides the element of suspense, there’s the fun of trying to unravel a complicated plot. Tell No One, a film by Guillaume Canet, has more twists and turns than most, keeping us guessing until the very end, when the story’s loose ends are finally, cleverly tied together.

François Cluzet plays a pediatrican named Alex Beck, blissfully married to his childhood sweetheart Margot (Marie-Josée Croze). But when they go on vacation to her family’s country estate, she is suddenly and mysteriously murdered. Cut to eight years later—we gradually learn that a notorious serial killer was sentenced for the crime, but that Alex himself had been a suspect. He has disappeared into his work in order to forget the pain. Then, two more bodies are discovered near where Margot died, which puts the police back on his trail. At the same time, Alex receives an e-mail with a video clip attachment that seems to indicate that his wife is still alive. Events spin out of control, with Alex running from the cops, while a shadowy group of killers follow his trail as well, and the fiendishly inventive story plunges into a spiral of paranoia and dread.

The script is adapted from a Harlan Coben novel and directed with intelligence and style by Canet. I especially like the way he throws the viewer into situations without explaining who the characters are—unraveling the different relationships is part of what makes the movie so involving. Kristen Scott Thomas is on hand as Alex’s best friend, a kindred spirit who also happens to be his sister’s lesbian lover. Then there’s a delicious turn by Philippe Lefebvre, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Canet, as an amusing, scrupulously honest detective in the great mystery tradition. In fact, the picture is crammed with colorful characters and subplots, but the story is always impelled forward with a unique blend of tension and cold logic.

Tell No One is not a deeply meaningful film, but it’s not just light entertainment either. Cluzet brings the right feeling of inconsolable grief and wounded anger to the lead role, and this tragic sense serves as a fine background for all the thriller and suspense elements. Unlike in a lot of mysteries, the solution is completely understandable, satisfying and potent in its portrayal of the power of corruption. Things are not at all what they at first seemed to be, but love is constant nevertheless.

*

When a little-known character actor suddenly shines in a lead role, it can be a thing of wonder. That’s the case with Melissa Leo, who has spent over twenty years doing supporting work in film and TV. She now stars in the film Frozen River, the debut effort of writer-director Courtney Hunt, which won the grand prize at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

Leo plays Ray Eddy, a stressed out middle-aged mom in an out-of-the-way town in northern New York, right across the border from Canada. She lives in a trailer, taking care of her two boys, 15-year-old T.J. (Charlie McDermott) and 5-year-old Ricky, while working part-time at the local dollar store. Her husband has split with the down payment for a much dreamed-of double-wide trailer, probably to gamble with. The creditors are closing in, and Ray can’t scrape enough together to feed the boys a decent meal. When she goes to the bingo hall to try to find her husband, she sees his car being driven away by a young Indian woman, and follows her onto the Mohawk reservation. Lila, as it turns out, has stolen the car to help facilitate some illegal money-making—she’s involved in smuggling Chinese aliens across the Canadian border. Ray ends up working with her in this dangerous business, telling herself that it’s only a temporary means for her to get out of the hole.

Lila is played by Misty Upham with a striking sense of stoic poise concealing a major hurt—her baby son was recently taken away from her. Also excellent is McDermott as Ray’s teenage son, sullen and combative—the fights between mother and son are so dead-on it’s funny. But Melissa Leo runs the show here. With a hard, haggard look, and a manner that reveals years of frustration and shattered hopes, Ray isn’t always a likable character—in fact, she’s sometimes narrow and bigoted, but Leo always makes her believable. Hunt, the director, conveys the feeling of poverty-line desperation, the constant making do with not enough, reflected in the forbidding desolation of the wintry landscape.

Ray and Lila’s determination to somehow overcome the odds is beautifully evoked by their dangerous car trips across the frozen river to Canada and back. And the plight of the exploited illegals that they carry expresses a more terrible situation, one which they try to avoid thinking of, until circumstances come to a head. Frozen River has a considerable amount of tension and suspense, but it’s not a thriller. Instead, it’s a stark parable of need and the struggles of conscience—played to the bittersweet end through the medium of the humblest working class lives.


©2008 Chris Dashiell
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