Absence of Malice (1981)
This feels like a 1970s film tipping into the changing tides of the 1980s. And yet, seen from thirty years later, it feels pertinent and crisp. In fact, the one aspect that wobbles the most is exactly what should be eternal, the love affair. Gallagher, the embattled, possibly shady importer who is the ambiguous male lead, and Megan, the young, everyday reporter on a big story, find they need something in each other that is deep and unique. Call it love, though I'm not sure they would. But Paul Newman and Sally Field, playing the two parts, don't have the screen chemistry to make it happen.
The plot seems leaky at times, but by the end, as you realize it's a complicated shell game that has partly kept clues from the viewer, it makes sense and is clever. The subplots and minor characters are generally interesting enough, including a utterly convincing, low-key performance by Wilford Brimley as a Justice Department official and Megan's editor at the paper, whose name I can't dig up. It is coincidence, I think, but these two are the two truly "good" people in the movie, though of course Megan is good at heart throughout, just misguided.
The movie poster for the release of the film emphasizes it's political ambitions: In America, Can a Man be Guilty until Proved Innocent? Director Sydney Pollack tries to tap into contemporary issues in his movies, often timely political ones, and that is the saving grace here, at least from 2010. The problem isn't so much a legal one, of presumed guilt. But of the role newspapers play in suggesting guilt, even a guilt that may not exist, and the way this destroys lives along the way. (A case in point is in the newspapers here in New York this February--a rumored scandal involving Governor Paterson has made him seem guilty even BEFORE a newspaper article was published about it, and the said article, when it appeared, seems to have had nothing to say about it. Meanwhile, Paterson scrambles.)
I wish the movie were actually a great movie. It has the makings for it. But it has gaffes (silly ones, as in the opening minutes when they are watching some surveillance footage on a projector and it freeze-frames several times, and yet the projector keeps running!) and it has slow parts, moments that are made to give the movie emotional depth that don't quite click (I never quite feel the friendship between Gallagher and his troubled friend). Still, it isn't such a bad movie you'll walk away. And the last third gets more interesting, with some plot twists worth paying attention to.
