Tell No One (2008)

There’s a moment that pops up about half-way through Tell No One that had me laughing - a little giddy at what I was buying into. Our hero, Alex Beck (Francois Cluzet), having recently come to suspect that his long thought dead or missing wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) may, in fact, be neither, breaks into a sprint - something occurs to him, and it has something to do with hearing U2’s “With or Without You”. The co-writer-director Guillaume Canet allows the song to play through, and we watch as Alex runs toward a computer lab - his years of desperate longing giving way to a bit of hope. Why don’t more pictures acknowledge how we catalogue our lovers with pop music? How we relive our loves with pop music? No other medium quite serves the same function - we, of course, can remember our past heartbreaks with film and books and so forth - but there’s something intangibly purer in popular music. Perhaps it has something to do with our love of movies after all - they’ve conditioned us to soundtrack our lives - to rationalize pain with, usually, the most banal distractions available. Tell No One, for the four or five minutes that U2 is allowed to comment, gets at this confusion, this pain, this search for comfort -in a funny, loose, relaxed way. And the scene has been, for the better part of the past hour, built to beautifully. Alex has been in a funk - morose, yet touchingly un-self-pitying, and we see how this macabre adventure has ironically allowed him to bloom again.

Cluzet is terrific in a role that’s trickier than it may appear to be. Cluzet has the every-man at the wrong place at the wrong time role; the helpless, at the mercy of everyone else in the movie kind of role that can be thankless, or dull. Or, if trusted to a superstar, unbelievable – stars normally have too much ego to convincingly convey desperation, or helplessness, or pity – they must continue to prove they have the biggest cock in the room, regardless of the circumstances. Cluzet manages to be convincing and charismatic; commanding, yet dialed down and average enough to allow for pathos – but in a graceful way. Cluzet gets our sympathy because, as the saying goes, he doesn’t ask for it. But Cluzet isn’t even self-conscious about not asking for our sympathy. Cluzet is a new generation Hitchcock hero – an everyman without the irony of the everyman being played by a God – such as Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart. Tell No One derails just as you totally give yourself over to it, but I wouldn’t dream of advising you to skip it. Our thrillers are generally so impersonal and divorced from any interior drive that one performance, and one true poppy-flakey moment, has to qualify as at least a partial success – even if these filmmakers seem to always insist in getting in their own way.

De Palma’s great thrillers are great because they understand (even if the audiences don’t) why audiences actually seek them out – that resolutions are beside the point. We seek empathy; we want something that connects to our inner drives in a down-home way. We want something to rile us up and get us tittery – laughing at the human acknowledgement that we’re all, more or less, scared and turned on by the same things. We don’t need complicated resolutions because that’s just shallow justification – mechanics that were dreamed up seemingly long ago, but that serve no logical function. George Sluizer’s original The Vanishing remains one of the greatest horror pictures ever made because it understood that the truest explanation is the simplest, the most obvious and boring, or that there isn’t an explanation. David Lynch understands that resolution only dampens the mood – perhaps too well, he sometimes ties himself in knots trying to clear himself of the obligation; but Sluizer pulled a far more organic hat-trick – he turned the yearning for explanation into the ultimate black kick of his picture – he punished his hero for trying to cook up something where there’s nothing to cook.

I go on about this because I’m not really interested in recalling the proper plot of Tell No One. I’ll give you a hint – imagine watching the first half of The Vanishing on TV, and then having your cable box go out. You manage to turn it on again, only to get the wrong channel, The Vanishing having, at an instant, given way to some sort of ludicrous, labored, John Grisham-flavored conspiracy thriller. Grisham, as dull as his novels and pictures tend to be, at least bothers to pave the way for his revelations as he goes. Canet doesn’t have the storytelling instincts for that, he trips up (he may have felt too obligated to the Harlan Coben novel that’s inspired him). The missing/dead wife’s disappearance has something to do with her job, and, for the life or me, I don’t think I was aware of her occupation until it was introduced as the Explanation for Everything That Has Transpired. Canet, after a brisk first half, gets bogged down in the introduction of one expository character after another, and One Big Explanation doesn’t suffice, we hear parts of it over and over. The picture becomes so unwieldy that I wondered for a moment if Canet was, perhaps, working toward the kind of resolution that was briefly in vogue a few years ago – the kind of ploy that would cancel two-thirds of the picture out as merely Alex’s grieve-stricken fever dream. I normally don’t go for that (it worked in Mulholland Dr. – beautifully) but it would have given Canet, and us, an out.

There is an unintended poignancy to the sloppiness of Canet’s construction. Tell No One has, even in its shakier passages, a consistence – that empathy that we seek from thrillers. Tell No One has a fragile, completely un-post-modern quality, the picture captures grief; and its ultimate, regrettable, absurdity only reinforces the strength of the picture’s relation to its hero. Tell No One feels like the film Cluzet watched to soothe himself the night after he lost his wife – to loose himself in mechanics. You damn near buy the ending in spite of yourself, because Canet and Cluzet have poked through the rules of rationality we use as our defenses against nonsense. Simply, you want Cluzet to find her.

Posted on September 1st, 2008 in Reviews, Thriller, 2008 |

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