State of Play and Tell No One
a double feature by Heather Craig
“I saw two good thrillers in two days,” I recently told a friend. “I don’t believe you,” was his response, and who can blame him? Good thrillers aren’t so common, so what are the odds of seeing two so close together? When I told him that I had seen one of them at the theater and saw the other via Netflix, he was more credulous, because clearly two superior thrillers being in the theaters simultaneously is too much of a stretch of the imagination.
I saw State of Play the night it opened in a theater packed with people so into the story that the silence was absolute. I heard no whispering, no muffled chewing, and blessedly, saw not a glimmer of the telltale light of a phone on which someone was texting. This complete attention is appropriate for such an intelligence thriller. The story is not simple, nor easy to summarize. Set in Washington, D.C., it starts with a bang. A young street person is running for his life, pursued by a hitman who kills him with a minimum of effort. The killer then shoots down a pizza delivery man on a bicycle who witnessed the murder. All of this is investigated by unkempt reporter Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe), who is one of those people who seems to be acquainted with absolutely everybody.
Soon after, a lovely young Congressional aide falls or is pushed from a subway platform. Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) bursts into tears during a congressional hearing when he is explaining his aide’s tragedy, causing rampant rumors of an affair between the two. This overshadows Collins’ hard-line push for an investigation into a company profiting, in his opinion, far too much from the war against terror.
Cal and Collins were college roommates but they have grown apart since. This keeps Cal from jumping to the prurient conclusions of the rest of the press corps, including his fellow Tribune employee, Della Frye (Rachel McAdams). Della writes the political blog for the paper, an online column which Cal holds in contempt. Cal and Della work together to connect the dots, and all the while Cal walks a very narrow line of conflict of interest when Collins asks for Cal’s help, as does Collins’ wife Anne (Robin Wright Penn) with whom Cal was once involved.
Russell Crowe makes Cal an absolute slob, with the floor of his car strewn with the wrappers of dozens of fast food drive-thrus. His hair needs cutting, his clothes don’t fit quite right, and he’s not an entirely nice guy, although he is an honest one, a man of integrity. As he mentors Della on the difference between fact and rumor, between investigating and speculating, we see her respect for him grow, even if at first meeting he admits, “I showed her a little snout.” Yes, he was a pig.
As Cal and Della’s conspiracy theory expands and their lives become endangered, the suspense ratchets notch by notch until the audience didn’t seem to be breathing at all. The story is tight, unsurprising as it is based on a 5 hour British TV miniseries, and it never seems to lag at all. Everything is important, and everything is connected.
Mention must be made of Cal’s boss Cameron Lynne (Helen Mirren), who wouldn’t mind going to the front page with less-than-substantiated facts if it might sell a few more papers. Mirren has never phoned in a performance in her life and this is no exception. She brings a lot more to the role than I believe was on the page in the beginning.
The plight of the newspaper is almost a subplot, so conscious of it are the characters. I’m not sure how many more contemporary movies might actually have the line this one does: “Stop the presses!” (They had to do it.) In something of an homage to newspapers in general, the credits roll to Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Long as I Can See the Light” while the entire process of a newspaper going to press is shown, from initial print to loading into the trucks. We won’t be seeing that for much longer. But hopefully we will be seeing political thrillers this intelligent for many years to come.
The other movie, Tell No One, is a more personal thriller, but no less riveting. In French with English subtitles, it tells the story of pediatrician Alexandre Beck (Francois Cluzet), who begins the movie in a seemingly idyllic marriage with his childhood sweetheart Margot (Marie-Josee Croze). After skinny dipping at a secluded lake, Margot goes to shore from their raft and Alex hears her scream. When he rushes to shore, he is knocked out with an oar to the face, and when he wakes up three days later, Margot is dead.
Here the movie skips ahead eight years in Alex’s life. This is a truly kind man, a man who tells overprotective parents of a diabetic child to ease up and let her be a child, a man who has earned the trust of a brutal thug enough that the man insists only Alex must work on his hemophiliac son, a man who takes his dog Nina almost everywhere. Still, the police have always suspected him in Margot’s death ; he was found on the shore so how exactly did he get there after being knocked unconscious from the pier? When the bodies of two men found at the lake are determined to have been dead eight years, the case is reopened, and Alex a suspect. At the same time, Alex receives an email which seems to be from Margot. “Tell no one,” it warns in closing.
What follows is a complex, yet somehow simple story of a man trying to exonerate himself and unravel the continuing mystery of his wife’s death while all the while falling deeper under police suspicion. Does Alex’s sister Anne (Marina Hands) or her wife Helene (Kristin Scott Thomas) know more than they have said about Margot? Do Margot’s parents? Who is emailing him and why? Who is keeping Alex under surveillance? And who do his watchers keep phoning with their reports? When Alex runs from the police who have arrived to arrest him, one of them says, “He just signed his confession.” While the cop believes that the innocent don’t run, he also reveals, of course, that he has never seen a movie or television show in his entire life. What exactly would movies be about if the innocent never ran away?
The chase is one of the best I have seen. This is a regular guy, not an athlete, so what chance does he have of eluding custody? More than you might think, and by the time the chase is on the freeway, with pursued and pursuers all on foot, you will be wondering exactly how this was ever filmed.
I’m afraid I can say little more about the plot without giving too much away. This, like State of Play, is the type of movie in which layers are slowly peeled back until the solution is seen. Knowing something ahead of time that is too far down in the layers would hinder one’s first-time enjoyment in the slow revelations. That is not to say that either film is not worth a second viewing.
Francois Cluzet was unknown to me prior to this movie, but I’m a fan now. The movie couldn’t work without him, and the constant state of quiet desperation he brings to Alex gets to you. I really really wanted him to be ok at the end of the movie. I cared. This is more subtle movie than The Fugitive but the innocent widower on the run parallel is definitely there.
I also must mention Francois Borleand who played the lone police officer who believes Alex is innocent. Borleand is best known to American audiences as the kindly Inspector Tarconi in all three of the Transporter movies. He plays such an affable man that I cannot imagine not liking him. Of course, I’ve never seen him play a villain.
Director Guillaume Canet makes the movie extremely personal. There are no sweeping shots of the city. This is the story of one man, and the camera seldom leaves him, whether he is fleeing the police in a gripping chase scene or sitting mourning his loss.
Tell No One is available on DVD and for instant play on Netflix. Extras include a few deleted scenes, and outtakes from filming mishaps. The film is based on the popular novel of the same name by American Harlan Coben, adapted into French for the movie, and referred to as Ne le dis a Personne in the film’s credits.
So the good thriller is not dead. It was just gathering its strength for a solid one-two punch.