Movie Reviews from
By John Ruch
© 1999 CM Media, Inc.
The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)
It’s no coincidence that one of the very first feature films was about a great train robbery. The heist movie is the quintessential Western film genre, the purest reflection of our mixed feelings about our brand of consumer-capitalism.
Heist movies uphold our secret admiration of scammers and thieves and also restore moral order by having them prove unsuccessful. They indulge our fantasies by displaying the goods of the rich, often embodied in a single fetish object (a jewel, a statue, a painting).
They defuse our anxieties of an increasingly technological, dehumanized society by showing people overcoming elaborate security mechanisms. They epitomize the mistrust and loneliness that so often result from a class-conscious culture that treats people variously as objects, commodities and suckers.
And most importantly, heist movies are more consistently fun than any other genre I can think of (well, maybe besides submarine movies). That may be because a modicum of intelligence is required to make such an intricate product; it may also be because the genre is so culturally significant and cathartic. “Fun” is a jar filled through a wide-mouthed funnel.
No surprise, then, that “The Thomas Crown Affair” is passably fun. An art-heist movie, it stars Pierce Brosnan as a bored millionaire who decides to thrill-steal a Monet from an art museum, and Rene Russo as an insurance investigator bent on retrieving the work.
A heist movie is only as good as its heist, and this film has a good heist, the source of most of its fun. The film is actually bookended by inverse heists; first Brosnan must steal the painting, then he must return it. These sequences are ingeniously plotted and allow Brosnan to show off his falir for suave, cool-headed action.
These sequences work largely in spite of director John McTiernan (“Die Hard,” “The Hunt for Red October”), whose rapid-edit, melodramatic action stylings do violence ot the film’s atmosphere and momentum. He directs a tango sequence and a sex scene (on a marble staircase, no less) the same way he directed Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Predator.” Hilarious.
Similar damage is done by condescending big-studio attitudes that demand everything in the film is explained in “Get it, stupid?” fashion. It’s especially a shame when subtle comic airs—Brosnan’s company being named “Crown Acquisitions,” or the heist involving a literal Trojan horse—are dragged into the spotlight to evaporate in the glare.
As for the weightier social issues, this is no “Asphalt Jungle,” and you wouldn’t expect it to be. It makes some brainy points; at other times, it inflates the genre’s usual mixed messages to levels of sheer hypocrisy.
We should note first of all that the film is a sort of art heist itself, a loose remake of a 1968 film of the same name that starred Steve McQueen as a bank-robbing millionaire and Faye Dunaway as the investigator (she makes a very ’90s cameo here as Brosnan’s shrink). It had a fancy heist bit, but is still mostly notable for giving the world the song “Windmills of Your Mind,” and for what is possibly the second-most-famous chess match in film history.
While the remake isn’t really a better film, it is in some ways a richer one. The theme of materialist ennui is established early on, when Brosnan realizes, “Enjoyment isn’t necessarily intimacy.” He finds that not only can he not buy love, he’s lost the capacity for it as a result of his greedy pursuits.
Enter
Russo, herself a nouveau riche
ladder-climber (she’s even from
The ultimate message of this film is that we must make the leap of faith and trust in a person’s character, rather than judging them (as consumer culture instructs us to) on their external appearances and actions. This point is mirrored by Brosnan’s supermodel girlfriend (Esther Cañadas), a character used slyly in a major plot twist to poke holes in the audience’s prejudices.
The same
point is also incarnated by the film itself, the first in recent memory to pair
an older leading man with a woman of his own age. It’s nice to see a believable
couple, and nicer still that
At the same time, however, the film also shows that Russo’s ladder-climbing is desirable and works to all intents and purposes by marrying a rich man, who also makes her more feminine. (She ceases wearing combat boots and carrying brass knuckles; in publicity materials, McTiernan likens the story to “The Taming of the Shrew.”) While Brosnan theoretically undergoes a softening and emotional awakening, we never see any of it; the film is instead focused on how a woman has to change and reshape herself to make a relationship work.
But where the film really undermines itself is in its attitude towards art. Heist movies may be a reaction to consumerism, but they are themselves consumer products, as is well demonstrated by the Pepsi product placements in this film (now, that’s art theft). That’s why they so often mix their messages.
One of the meanest ways American culture in particular keeps people stupid, stifled and complacent is by treating art not as an expression of the human soul, but rather as just another commodity. It is bought and consumed like a drug for temporary, predetermined effect and altered by censors as though it were a pair of pants.
With an apparent lack of irony, this film buys right into that viewpoint. Brosnan seems to appreciate his Monet intrinsically, but this is never verbalized. Instead, we’re told the painting is important only because “it’s worth a hundred million bucks”; a naked statue is used for dumb sex jokes; a poor cop (rounding out the class structure) played by Denis Leary says he’s not too interested in track down “swirls of paint that only a few silly rich people care about.”
If art is triviality good only for making money or inspiring jokes, and if film is art, then what is this film saying about itself?
During the final heist, one audience member responded to the museum’s fancy security system by saying, “Wow! Look at that! That is sophistication!” And I realized the dirty trick this movie is playing (and that consumer culture has played on us all): It’s making us want everything its hero is trying desperately to escap