Confidence (2003)

A dead man (Edward Burns, who really does act with all the expressiveness of a dead man throughout) tells a man with a gun to his head the story of his recent travails.

A successful con turns sour on con artiste Jake Vig (our dead man) and his team (Paul Giamatti, Brian van Holt and Louis Lombardi), when they realize their mark was working for a crazy, polymorphously perverse gangster boss who likes to be called The King (Dustin Hoffman). Even worse, the mark was paying them with the King’s money. After an unfortunate killing of a member of the team, Jake offers the King to work a con for him, to make up for their little differences, on the victim of the King’s choice. The King’s not going to make things easy, so the victim is one Morgan Price (Robert Forster), a man as difficult to get at as possible.

Still, Jake’s ego and those needs that must cook up a plan that might even work. He pretty randomly recruits hot pickpocket Lily (Rachel Weisz), because the film really needs a romance between two actors with zero chemistry (or rather, between a usually brilliant actress trying to get any emotional reaction from what might very well be a well-groomed rock) as well as the inevitable romantic betrayal.

Obviously, there will be twists as well, or did anybody expect the first person narrator of a movie about con artists to be telling the truth, and all of it?

Which does lead us neatly into Confidence’s main problem: a script that simply isn’t as smart as it believes to be, and so copies the surface level elements of other movies about cons, and a lot of the in 2003 inevitable Tarantino-moves without ever thinking about what they are actually good for in general or could be useful for in its own specific case.

But then, Confidence very much lacks in specificity as a whole. In part, this is the fault of very bland character writing where some verbal tics stand in for even the most basic of characterization, so much so that even great actors like Rachel Weisz and Andy Garcia can’t do much more than look sexy or wear weird clothes, respectively, while Dustin Hoffman simply pretends to be in a Tarantino film, alas not one with Tarantino’s hand for getting unexpected performances out of his actors. It does not help here at all that our viewpoint character as embodied by Edward Burns is quite so bland and lacking in personality; other characters tell us incessantly how cool he is, but assumed traits really don’t stick to a surface that boring.

In other ways, Confidence is nearly painfully of its precise point in time. James Foley’s direction is certainly slick, but it is slick in the manner of something shot with a “filmmaking styles of 2003” handbook in one hand. The score is exactly the sort of mutated Hip Hop Beat stuff you’d expect as well, the editing seems obsessed with having scenes ending on a quip or a one-liner (reaction shots are for losers, apparently) as if this were a TV show dragging us into an ad break, and so on and so forth. Everything here simply manages to be at once completely of its time and perfectly generic – one might call that an achievement, if one’s lifetime weren’t finite.

Three Films Make A Post: For justice. For loyalty. For friendship.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005): I am really rather fond of the handful of films Tommy Lee Jones directed. While also centred around Jones as an actor, these films are prime examples of a quiet and collected post-New Hollywood filmmaking style, never stylistically showy, but always shot in such a way as to help keep actors and their characters at the centre. This one also recommends itself through a really peculiar sense of humour, the willingness to leave questions unanswered, as well as a what feels like a the conviction to meet characters on their own terms, and follow the lines of inquiry that leads to. Curiously enough, given how Jones is supposed to be on set, these lines tend to lead to compassion (not an uncritical one, mind you) and understanding, not the kitschy idea of these concepts, but the sort of thing that’s actual work for everyone involved.

Alone on the Pacific aka Taiheiyô hitoribotchi (1963): Kenichie (Yujiro Ishihara) makes it his young life’s goal to cross the Pacific to the USA in a one person sailboat. For much of its running time, the film cuts between our hero’s misadventures at sea and his growing up disaffected, eventually planning his trip. Director Kon Ichikawa doesn’t really lean into the adventure elements of the tale too hard – though he is perfectly willing and able to portray some of Kenichie’s troubles at sea, he is more interested in a meticulous portrayal of the state of mind a body at the borders of its endurance can reach, touching the surreal and the stylistically theatrical because these seem to be closest to the state of mind Kenichie gets into. There’s also quite a bit of social commentary towards post war Japan and the way it treats its youth, but I’m not terribly sure I’m the right audience for that part of the film.

At Close Range (1986): James Foley’s version of a true crime story is a deeply frustrating movie. The cast, with a young Sean Penn, Christopher Walken, Mary Stuart Masterson, Chris Penn and so on is brilliant. Foley even seems to realize this and provides them with a lot of big scenes to do big actor things in. The problem is that most of these scenes are utterly wrong-headed, never giving the actors the material to be people instead of characters in a movie built out of clichés from other movies. The script (by Elliott Lewitt and Nicholas Kazan) makes the impression of being written by people who have never met one of the small town and rural poor before, portraying people, their motivations and actions in ways that never feel anything but wrong. On the direction side, Foley polishes everything to a sheen that often works against the story he is trying to tell, making poverty and the world rural noir tales are made of look like an overdirected 80s ad, making it impossible to believe in these characters and the places they are supposed to inhabit.