Last updated on March 1, 2015
There Be Spoilers Ahead!
Sleuth is a strange, strange film. Originally an award-winning play by Andrew Shaffer in 1970, it further became a film in 1972 starring Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier. Now, it emerges yet again as a 2007 remake/reboot/something starring (again) Michael Caine and Jude Law, this time with Caine’s role reversed. Confused yet?
That is very much the experience of watching a play turned into a film. Sometimes, such adaptations work rather brilliantly – Coriolanus, for example, made a successful jump from page to stage to screen, and somehow turned a story about the Roman Empire into a convincing totalitarian, Eastern Bloc dictatorship. Other times, one can immediately tell that a play does not always translated visually onto the dynamic camera angles necessary to create an exciting experience revolving around exactly two actors, one house, and a game of wits between them. For the most part, I think this version succeeds, and mostly because Michael Caine and Jude Law are pretty fantastic actors with a fantastic vetaran of the stage and other film-play adaptations (Kenneth Branagh) directing the till of the ship.
But, I am getting ahead of myself. What is Sleuth about, exactly? The play is set in the Wiltshire manor house of Andrew Wyke, an immensely successful mystery writer, played here by Michael Caine. Wyke’s home reflects his obsession with the inventions and deceptions of fiction and his fascination with games and game-playing – the entire thing is riddled with security camera, and it feels as if he is some kind of hermit. For the pure love of the game and the thrill, he lures his wife’s lover, Milo Tindle (Jude Law), to the house and convinces him to stage a robbery of her jewelry – mostly for entertainment value, of course. That very proposal sets off a chain of events that leaves the audience trying to decipher where Wyke’s imagination ends and reality begins, as well as the motivations of the two people “playing the game”, so to speak. That leaves one feeling the cold, artificial nature of the whole affair; humans do not relate in this world, but fight each other for reasons both paradoxical and impenetrable. The cold, uninviting house and dark shades of blue all over add to a strange atmosphere that permeates the entire proceeding.
Honestly, I have never watched something where I did not quite perceive what each character really wanted, or what exactly they wanted to get. Sleuth exists in the strange realm of the hyperreal, where you see caricatures on screen and wits battling, rather than any kind of meaningful attachment. Wyke has an obvious problem with Tindle because he’s taken his wife, but he doesn’t seem to care. Rather, assuming that Wyke’s wife is actually smart in some sense, he is more impressed with Tindle taking his wife at all than anything else. Does he really want to frame him at all, or does he “appreciate his mind”, as he says?
I can say clearly that both men hate each other, but both also love the game of wits more than they love the women who, supposedly, exists at the center of the game. She never appears in the film at all, merely a goal or prize to be won rather than a character in her self. The two protagonists displayed here care more for winning, and they deceive in whatever manner possible to win the game. The promise of riches, pleasure, homosexuality, disguises, actual weaponry and not just verbal barbs – you name it, they go for it.
The question you probably ask yourself at this juncture is, I assume: what is the point of all this? What we see isn’t so much the words and language, but the actual purpose. In our Internet language, you might say they are comparing their “e-peens”; each wants to beat the other at their own game, regardless of the strange mental toll and cost. Heck, one of the first written lines of dialogue in the whole film is a pretty sly euphemism for it, with a framing shot just to accentuate the difference in, ahem, “size”.
Tindle: That’s my car.
Wyke: Oh, the little one?
Tindle: Not the big one.
Wyke: No, the big one’s mine.
Their dialogue appears quite…friendly, in a way. Juvenile, in some sense. The cordiality eventually boils away to reveal the dark heart behind the madness. They will appear friendly on the surface but twist language into malefic shapes to beat their opponent at any cost. The claustrophobia of the tight quarters in the house only adds to the tension: one man will win, and the other one will lose. Whose pride will win the day? Does the woman even matter? Honestly, I just found it fascinating to watch. The language, and the performance, are really the reason to see this. Nothing really exists as it seems, and everything, even the most banal things, carry strangely insidious implications. Does anybody really mean anything?
Is the ending somewhat predictable? I suppose you could say that. The play itself has been around long enough, and the ever-heightening tension, tells us that one of the players here will not last for the whole game, whether by force or choice. But that, I think, is not really the point. Watch this for the biting, palpable tension and fencing between two exceedingly brilliant actors. I found it an “intellectual” guilty pleasure, all said; I can’t say much of anything reflects a change in my thoughts regarding the human heart, but I’ll be darned if I didn’t enjoy myself. I prefer this much more than watching Branagh direct Thor, that’s for sure!
